


though you are alone and not quite beyond loneliness--

by Dialux



Series: i promise not to follow it [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Art Forgery, BAMF Booker | Sebastien le Livre, BAMF Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, BAMF Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Brother-Brother Relationships, Character Study, Drowning, F/F, Gen, How Loving Things Reveals You And Why It's Uncomfortable, How To Be Both The Nice Guy And The Fucking Asshole In Your Family: A Demonstration by Booker, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Redemption, Sometimes Love Is Defenestrating Your Brother Through A Two-Story Window, Traveling The World In Search For Meaning, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, the vagaries of art forgery when surrounded by ppl who lived through that art period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:46:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 26,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25859176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: “Joe didn’t lie back in that lab,” Booker tells him gently. “I am selfish. I am a liar. But beyond everything else, Nicky, I’m a coward.”“Really,” says Nicky, looking unimpressed.[Booker tries to save his family from Quynh. He's rather good at it, if not a little dramatic about the entire process. In the meantime, he learns a little more about himself, his family, and the definitions of bravery, forgiveness and love.]
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman
Series: i promise not to follow it [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1893748
Comments: 273
Kudos: 907





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There are so many warnings for this fic that I do not know where to begin. Um. Major character death doesn't apply to anyone on a permanent basis, even the non-immortals that we encountered in the movie. Otherwise, in various depth, the following are discussed: Drugs, drug addiction, and how death can erase that drug addiction from a body; Alcoholism (this is a Booker character study, I think this one, at least, is par for the course); Suicidal tendencies; Violent tendencies; Loss of family and the grieving that entails; Insanity; Er. Data privacy? If that's a thing to warn for; Depression, mourning, all of that... stuff. Yk. Booker's whole schtick.
> 
> I think it's a happy fic overall, but there's a lot of... working through emotions that have been festering for the past two centuries, so. Um. It's not a light fic for sure.
> 
> The story notes were actually too big for me to fit into the end-notes, so they're going into a second chapter. I wrote most of the story in a kind of fugue state, but also kept track of a number of the influences, which, if anyone's interested:  
> 1.["Litany In Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48158/litany-in-which-certain-things-are-crossed-out.) by Richard Siken remains the most important thing that I kept re-reading to go back to Booker’s mindspace. Particularly this quote: “Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.”  
> 2\. ["Brother,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6TXPNybrmk) by Kodaline had many lines that I really wanted to use as a title, but decided against in the end because as much as this is a brother-brother relationship fic, it’s more than that  
> 3\. Svrcina’s ["Who Are You?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWk4zqmQwVE), Jaymes Young's ["I'll Be Good,"](https://youtu.be/scd-uNNxgrU) and Of Monsters And Men's ["Wild Roses,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9LPQmkao8c) all played an important role in just… setting my mood  
> 4\. Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous” has a [very interesting quote](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9860951-you-once-told-me-that-the-human-eye-is-god-s) regarding the human eye that briefly inspired Booker’s conversation with Sasmita in the beginning: “You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing.”  
> 5\. Ellen Bass’s ["The Thing Is,"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151844/the-thing-is) is also a _wonderful_ poem that informed how I saw Booker’s recovery/acceptance of life as a thing worth living  
> 6\. _Manon, Ballerina_ by Saint-Exupery is an amazing book to read- I don’t read French fluently, but my sister does and she’s been sending me translated chunks of text, one of which was regarding life and goes like: “Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But that’s the only way to exist in this world. To learn spring means to understand the danger of winter. To be present means to understand the danger of absence.”
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy XDD

Booker finds his way to France, then to Paris, via a meandering, liver-pickling, unsavory path.

He doesn’t mind, really; he hadn’t known he was going to Paris until he found himself in the city, and he hadn’t know he’d remain in Paris until he unearthed a key so he wouldn’t freeze in the night- not that it would be permanent, but it’s one of those deaths that he really fucking  _ loathes;  _ finding out that you’re immortal in Russia does that to a person- and then just didn’t leave. There’s even a relatively decent half-done Bourdichon replica tucked away in one of the bookshelves that, after Booker finally uses up his slush fund, gets finished in a blurry haze of alcohol withdrawal, and then sold off for a cool half million euros.

Booker owns the shithole he’s living in, doesn’t actually need food or electricity to survive, and is perfectly willing to have running water in the flat on the sporadic months that he remembers to pay the bill. The only thing he needs the money for is wine.

Well.

Wine, and rum, and vodka, too; though the taste of the vodka is inseparable from the memory of his winter in Russia  _ after  _ dying for the first time: with Nicky and Joe, cold down to his bones, alive only by the barest skin of his teeth, huddling and miserable and so afraid he almost craved death. Booker had thought he’d known what it meant to want to die then, but he’d been so young- so fucking optimistic, really- and he’d only been exhausted and full of despair, not the kind of all-consuming desire to just lay down and not get up again that he’d been in the decades surrounding his family’s deaths.

But the  _ point  _ is that he doesn’t need a lot of money. 

…

Not really. The point is that Booker doesn’t need money because he doesn’t have anything to live for. The point is that it takes very little to kill a body over and over again until even whatever humorous deity exists up above decides to take away its blessing. The point is that Booker knows death, and wants to die, and will continue to die for however long the damned fucking bitch of a god lets him without making it permanent.

…

(A hundred years?

Oh, Booker doesn’t get fired, though it’s what everyone thinks. Booker  _ quits.  _ Checks out. Sells them out, and it isn’t even jealousy; it isn’t even hurt.) 

(A hundred years?

Don’t make him laugh: he’s not returning.)

…

When he meets his wife, Sebastien le Livre is a young man in Strasbourg, not quite down on his luck but certainly not thriving. She’s from a baker’s family: hair like straws of wheat, eyes like a golden summer sky, cheeks round as her father’s sweets. Her name is Clotilde when he asks around, and it suits her, her temper, her sweet-sharp tongue like a stick of cinnamon, burning slow and long and thickly, spicily sweet.

He loves her. 

The first miracle he ever experiences is Clotilde’s kiss, soft on his lips.

…

There are people who can move past loss. There are people who don’t love with the whole of their beings. There are people for whom the present is distinct from the past, and therefore allows for a fresh start and a new beginning. There are people that do not treat love like a fever.

It’s really, really fucking sad that Booker isn’t one of them.

…

One of the myriad of days, bleeding into each other until he’s unsure whether it’s daylight or streetlight peeking through the closed blinds, never mind the day or month: his phone rings.

“‘lo,” he croaks out.

“Booker? Booker!” The voice at the other end of the call is ridiculously shrill, and even more ridiculously energetic. Too much for his poor brain, which hasn’t had food since he last picked up a baguette from a bakery while stumbling home in the morning and ate it cold, and hasn’t heard actual words from another human since then either. “Are you- Christ, you sound bad. Did she get to you already?”

“Are you speaking English,” says Booker wearily. 

“I- yes?” There’s a momentary pause, then the voice says, slowly, “I think you said something about… England. Or English. I don’t actually speak French, you know?”

“English,” says Booker, and claws enough energy out of somewhere to speak in a language other than his mothertongue. It feels vaguely humiliating; he’s always been very good at adapting to new cultures and technology and the lingua franca of the day, and if he were even a little less worn ragged, he’d be worried about what he’s done to his brain. As it is, he only manages to translate his words into a thickly accented Liverpudlian accent, which seems to be the only English his brain’s willing to form without any further fuel. “Right. This is Nile, isn’t it?”

“Booker,” says Nile, spacing the syllables out like they’re taffy. “Are you okay? You sound weird.”

“I am… incredibly drunk.”

“Oh.”

“Have been for a few months.” He snorts, and adds, “Might be the longest bender any human’s been on, actually. You should ask Andy if she’s ever beaten it.”

“Right.” The thrown edge to Nile’s voice fades, like she’s chosen to ignore him; she sounds, instead, abruptly business-like. “I’ll do that. But you need to leave. Get to safety. D’you remember Quynh?”

“Quynh,” says Booker, using Nile’s trick against her in the manner that only truly classically trained French tongues can do, turning one syllable into two, three, ten. “I’ve never met her.”

“Do you have dreams about her? Can she have dreams about you?”

The truthful answer to that is,  _ Yes, but it doesn’t matter,  _ because Booker’s been in a locked room in a dark street in a shabby part of Paris for the past few months, and there’s nothing that can be used to identify it, not with the curtains closed and Booker himself limiting his movements to the barest minimum. But Booker’s not gotten this far by underestimating his fellow immortals. The even more truthful answer to that is  _ No,  _ because Booker’s also identified the most potent cocktail of drugs to work out a dreamless sleep and has spent the past two hundred years refining it to the point of perfection. But Booker’s not in the habit of telling the truth either.

“Yes,” he says aloud.

“Get the fuck out of there. And start running. She’s escaped, and she’s gone insane, and it’s bad, Booker, it’s really,  _ really  _ fucking bad-”

She stops talking and there’s a thud; the phone’s fallen to the floor, but it’s still working. Booker jerks, a little, and drops the bottle in his fingers soundlessly onto a pile of shirts heaped by the armchair. He presses the phone a little harder to his ears. Listens, brain running sharp enough to remember everything even if it can’t decipher it all in the moment.

“Quynh,” says Nile quietly. She sounds scared, and it twinges at something in Booker’s chest: Nile shouldn’t sound like that, he thinks, all worn and small. “Where’s Joe?”

“Don’t worry about him,” says a voice in a strange accent- it’s the same one that Booker remembers from Andy, when Andy would wake on an early mission and forget to mask it properly; not quite an accent of any specific region but a product of ancient languages that Booker’s probably never even heard of. “You’ll see him soon enough.”

“I don’t-”

“I promise,” says Quynh, and it’s so awfully smoothly familiar- Andy, he thinks, on a deep, visceral level, Andy, Andy,  _ Andy-  _ that Booker chokes, then convulses on himself to keep from making any audible noises.

There is something that crashes, and something else that slams, and something else that screams.

Some _ one  _ who screams.

Booker flinches through each of the sounds, but his grip on the phone doesn’t ease, and he doesn’t let himself make a single sound until there’s been utter silence on the other end for a full fifteen minutes. Only then does he lay the phone down on the arm of his chair, and press the fingers of his left hand to his eyes, hard enough to cause white spots to dance in his vision. He leans forward, buries his face in his knees, and weeps quietly, muffled, into the jeans that have become caked onto his body with grime and dirt. 

Then he gets up, and sneaks into his neighbor’s shower- it’s midday and a weekday, as it turns out, so they’re not at home because  _ someone’s  _ being an upstanding citizen of the world- and sloughs off the caked-up material, and sneaks back into his own apartment while clutching his clothes instead of wearing them. It doesn’t take him much to turn the apartment livable again; he’s been living in a corner of it, piling up the bottles of alcohol and surrounding himself with everything he’d need instead of relocating to a bed or the kitchen. It has, at least, the advantage of proximity; all Booker needs to do is pick up a bag and throw all the glass into it, and then lug that bag down to the trash-collection outside, and then put the rags of his shirts onto the electric stove until they catch fire because there’s no way in hell that he’s going to try to keep any of that cloth. Nothing else to clean up to make the apartment livable again.

There’s a leather bag he picks up from the bedroom, stuffed with banknotes, an airgapped laptop, and a really nice set of passports. 

“Bet you wish you’d exiled Joe right about now,” he mumbles to the Andy in his head, and slings the bag over his spine, tosses the still on-fire clothes into the trash, and slips out.

…

At the airport, he pauses and leans against a concrete pillar, lets it scrape off the top layer of his forehead. It’s cold and steady. Booker thinks about the waves and the cold and the hate like a storm, lashing against his skin. 

(The others are all scared of the bottomless ocean. They’d avoided crossing the Atlantic for the longest time because none of them wanted to end up like-)

(Booker’s scared, too, of course. Here’s the difference: he’s never not called himself a coward.)

He’s got a reasonable enough shield against Quynh, and a reason to stay away. Every reason to stay away. He’s exiled for his own actions, and Quynh hasn’t got a way to track him, and Nicky will probably stab him for not following the rule of law even after Booker saves him, because he’s a vicious little pedant at the core of his personality. 

_ Promise me you’ll love them. _

“Fuck you,” says Booker, savagely, to the ghost of his wife.

A woman walking by sends him a strange look for talking to thin air, and a father hoists his son up onto his hip, glaring. Booker swallows the first surge of guilt and the shame that follows on the heels of the guilt, and he stalks into the airport.

He books a flight to Bangladesh.

…

There’s still wifi in Bangladesh, right?

…

In Bangladesh, he tracks down a Sasmita LK, who’s wanted by the American FBI’s white collar department for- supposedly- forging some van Leyden engravings. Booker couldn’t care less about how she evades their authority; he’s been on the wrong side of forgery too many times to not feel some camaraderie for her position. What’s he’s interested in is her technique on aging the wood. Booker’s focused on canvases and such for a long time now, but if he can expand his skillset into wooden carvings, the chances of being caught will drop considerably. 

More accurately, he’s  _ fascinated  _ by her innovation.

Booker’s also got money, and Sasmita’s been burned straight out of the business with too much exposure. They can help each other. 

And, sure, Booker needs to save his old team, but first he needs to lie low for- at least- a few days, doesn’t he? Keep out of sight of Quynh. Figure out the lay of the land. Better it be learning a skill that can hold them all in good stead than drinking himself into oblivion.

…

Sasmita is a petite woman with rough hands and a smile that could light up an entire room. She quite clearly judges Booker for his smooth palms; he’s struck with the urge to tell her that he’d once had calluses in at least half the places she does, before immortality erased them with his first death. 

He does manage to surprise her with his skill in recreating the carving she assigns to him.

Booker laughs, and doesn’t explain: Andy’s learned wood-carving from some of the finest artists in the land and spent a few of the less wine-soaked nights teaching him the skills. Booker’s the once-removed student of the very same van Leyden and Bruegel that Sasmita holds in such reverence. 

She teaches him the technique for the wood-aging: how to make the holes look like wormwood, how to pack the holes with moss to make it look damp but still allow the actual integrity of the piece to remain untouched, the exact number of hours to bleach the wood in the sun. Booker takes to the skill with alacrity; he’s always been a quick learner, whatever else his faults.

“You have good hands,” says Sasmita, one day, watching him closely as Booker follows the delicate curve of van Leyden’s classic works: the damned man hadn’t liked straight lines in the foreground, and it’s beyond frustrating to keep the smooth arch in wood that doesn’t actually favor such careful decor. “You’re an artist then?”

“Something like that,” says Booker in Hindi.

Sasmita knows Bengali very well, and is passable in English, but Booker spent a decent amount of time in Pakistan following the partition from India to know Hindi better than Sasmita’s fumbling attempts in English. Also, he’d rather avoid the language for as long as possible; it reminds him too much of Nile’s voice on that call, edging towards shrill, scraped thin and raw.

“I was… a warrior,” he says slowly, eyes narrowing on the wood. It’s easier for the words to rattle loose when he’s thinking about something else, and this wood’s just challenging enough to merit his attention. “A soldier. For a long time, I wanted nothing more than to leave: and then I did, and my family died, and I had nothing left. War was all I knew how to do.”

Sasmita settles back into her seat. “And you learned art along the way?”

“War can be beautiful,” says Booker wryly. “And you see much of the world when you go to destroy it. But no; I learned forgery because I couldn’t think of a better way to escape. Then I just…” He pauses, looking for the words. “Kept at it, I’d say in English.”

“Mmm. I understand.”

“I like making things,” he says, and gets the shallow scrape of the lady’s skirt’s shadow just right. Glances up at Sasmita and her dark eyes, so similar to Joe’s in their warmth and their kindness. Stands straight, works out the kinks in his lower back, flexes his hand. “I don’t- I’m not good at making things of my own. But if you give me twenty things that somebody else has made, I can make three art pieces that look like they made it.”

“Such is a forger’s skill.”

“You lose sight of yourself, though, when you keep doing it for others.”

“You westerners,” says Sasmita, with such fondness that Booker turns to look at her. “Yourself? You can never see yourself as clearly as you would wish. But that does not change who you are. You  _ are,  _ no matter if you love or you loathe yourself. What does it matter who you are? What does it matter what you can be? You are. You already are. You live in this world, and you are a part of it, and it belongs to you as much as you belong to it. It does not matter what you see, or what others see: you are  _ here,  _ and that is all that matters.”

“You don’t understand.”

“No,” agrees Sasmita. “I do not. I don’t understand what sight matters in this world when it is impossible anyways.” She reaches out and pats his wrist. “Sometimes it would be easier if we accepted things, instead of fighting them until the end.”

Booker pulls his wrist away, pressing the back of it to his mouth. “Believe me,” he says, “I’ve tried.”

“Mmm. My father had cancer. He never believed he could die of it, though. A week- a week before he passed- everyone could see that he wasn’t going to survive it.” The late sun paints her face in gold and red, flattens her features into something that’s a very similar shade to her garishly painted walls. “He could barely open his eyes! But he wouldn’t tell me how he wished his last rites to go, no matter how much I asked. He was so busy talking about going back to his village and seeing all of the people there, he couldn’t talk about dying. I like to think that he walked up to the gates of death and refused to believe that he was no longer on earth, not even when the Bhagavan himself told him he was dead.” She looks up at him, and there’s pity, bitter as gall and deep as the ocean, in her eyes, which aren’t very similar to Joe’s at all. “Sometimes we choose not to do the easy thing, as well.”

“Yes,” says Booker. 

(He looks up at the sky, and remembers a time when he’d been in the Philippines a few hours before a hurricane hit. It’d been a wet heat then, not the dry thin air of Bangladesh; but the sky had shone a sick shade of yellow that he’s never seen before or after. Even this golden sunset isn’t the same, more beautiful and less dangerous in equal measure. But he remembers the humidity in his lungs only hours later, and the screams of the children and the bodies, limp as dolls strewn on wood and stone. Nicky, he remembers, had calmed the kids down, and Joe had gone about getting their names and the names of their parents, and Andy had, after giving them a few hours to rest, firmly and kindly made the still-parentless kids examine the corpses left behind to confirm whether they were orphans or not. 

Booker had heard voices coming from a nearby building: there were people inside but they were trapped because the other entrances had collapsed and the only one left had opened underwater, and nobody was brave enough to leave. He’d swum in and gotten them out, and then led them back to where the kids were crumpled on the ground, still soaking wet.

It would’ve been smarter to ask Andy, or even Joe. But Booker also knows how none of them ever use water as an extraction point, not even when it would be the safest option. So he’d gone in alone, and he’d drowned himself three times, and he’d gotten twelve other humans out to safety for his pains.)

(The easiest thing he’s done since he stopped staying dead is betray his family.

What does  _ that  _ say about him?)

“Are there unforgivable things to you?” he asks abruptly.

Sasmita, who’s been humming as she sketches something on a piece of rough paper, stops singing, though her fingers keep flying over the paper. “My husband’s family disowned me when they found out how I was getting the money to send my children to school. I haven’t seen Aditi nor Adarsh for three years now, though I keep sending them letters. Sometimes I don’t know if I ever will.” She puts her sketch down, and Booker sees the face that she’s drawn, all soft lines and wide mouth and large eyes, clearly related to herself. “But I don’t think it’s unforgivable.” Booker wonders what she’d say about him, he who has killed and slaughtered and betrayed, all for nothing and no one. “I live in hope, I suppose.”

_ “How?” _ Hope has never been something Booker knows intimately. 

“Because if I did not,” says Sasmita weightily, “I would go mad.”

…

Madness, on the other hand, is something that Booker knows, has flirted with, has slept besides, has caressed and cajoled and tempted and loved and feared and loathed and wanted. 

…

From morning to noon, he hijacks satellites and goes hunting for Copley. It isn’t easy, but Booker’s got patience on his side as well as time. Then he drags himself out of the shitty hotel he’s located in and goes on a buying spree: fruits, some prepared sweets and meats- he hasn’t got a kitchen to cook anything in, which is  _ really  _ how he knows that Nicky and Joe aren’t involved in anything right now; they’d die of sheer outrage if they knew how he’s been living- and then sneaks into Sasmita’s highrise apartment. Gives her some of the food, settles into learning whatever she’s willing to teach him. Leaves past sundown, meanders back to the hotel, drinks himself into a haze, ingests the nice cocktail of sleep-medication, goes to sleep and then wakes within four hours to a dark sky, a throbbing head, and another day to try to find out what the fuck’s happened to his family.

…

Two weeks later, he finds out that Copley’s dead.

Booker wishes he were more surprised, but he isn’t; he also doesn’t think that Copley’s the kind of man who’d be too sad to go. He can recognize a kindred spirit when it comes to him: Copley’s grief had been too raw for Booker to really, truly reject all those months before the Merrick debacle, and he’s fairly certain that Copley’s finest moment remains inspiring Andy to continue on her work. More good will come of that single determination than literally lifetimes of other service.

But if Copley’s dead, then it means that Quynh’s really doing this properly, which is… not good.

_ Don’t be coy now,  _ he imagines Andy saying in her sharp-sweet voice.  _ It’s really, really fucking bad. _

“Oh, Quynh,” mutters Booker, and edits the programs he’s been using to search for her directly instead of just trying to hunt Copley down. Gets a good hit on the South China Sea, which at least gives him a location to study. “You should’ve tried to do this twenty years ago. Now…”

Now, Booker’s got enough training and instrumentation hanging around the world to save his family.

…

He does stay until noon, and says goodbye to Sasmita, and takes the shirt-piece that she presses into his hands with only the minimum deflections. Then he gets on a plane to Sanya, where he tracks down someone who’s rather famous in the criminal world for having figured out a way around carbon dating, and spends a week learning his tricks- a mass spectrometer with heavy carbon emissions, or, barring that, an industrial warehouse that emits larger amounts of carbon monoxide to douse the wood in carbon- while also- quietly- tracking down the exact island off which Quynh was last located.

It takes him some time, but when he does, he has to go on-location to extract the video feeds because the cameras are too low-tech to be hacked. The mission there and back is a mess and a half; Booker puts the tapes in a water-proof container and literally  _ swims  _ the three hundred odd kilometers back to shore when his boat gets discovered, drowning seven times and consuming enough salt to have probably fucked up his blood pressure if that’s a thing that he needs to worry about. If any of the others were around, he wouldn’t have bothered- Andy’d probably have some contacts to fly them out- but it’s a new experience, and one that he really hopes never to have to do ever again because it fucking  _ sucks. _

Watching the videos themselves takes time, but Booker finally identifies it: Quynh’s talking in English, which is strange but not out of reason if it’s Nile in front of her, and though he isn’t the best lip-reader, he thinks she’s saying something about  _ Suffering as I’ve suffered. _

A black leg kicks out in the video from another angle, barely visible, and Booker thinks it’s Andy; it’s too slender to be either Nicky or Joe. But he still doesn’t know who Quynh’s talking to, because it’s all too dark and grainy in the video, and Booker doesn’t think it matters, but really- 

Quynh unearths something that’s eerily similar to how  _ she’d  _ been imprisoned: black metal, stainless steel, the kind that doesn’t rust. 

“Not making the same mistakes as your captors,” says Booker aloud, to the empty room, and the feed goes out.

He realizes that it isn’t the fault of the tape; he’s accidentally crushed the laptop with his hands. For a moment, Booker debates taking a break. It’s all like a bad nightmare, watching his family undergo this when he’s the only one to really deserve it. It hits so fucking close to home.

Then he picks up the second laptop in his bag, rearranges the apparatus he’s using to translate the VHS tape to something visible on the laptop that doesn’t, actually, have a CD-port, and watches the whole video through grimly, hands gripping fingers so tightly that he’s fairly certain he breaks them a few times over until it’s finished.

The person’s in a loose black hood and thrashes when they’re thrown into the iron maiden. There’s no sound in the video, but Booker can imagine the screams being swallowed up by bubbles, leaving nothing but silence. The black leg in the corner is twitching, but otherwise remains immobile. Booker waits: sees the two other iron maidens that get dragged out, and then he really doesn’t bother trying to control himself.

Just punches the screen out.

The glass comes out of his fist too quick for him to really feel the pain, and it’s infuriating. 

(It’s been infuriating since he buried his sweet, sweet Clotilde and never felt the same kind of wrenching pain that lived in his heart on his body. Oh, yes, immortality doesn’t mean the cessation of pain, but it means the death of eternal pain: and that is what Booker knows in the horrid, ancient, throbbing caverns of his heart.)

It’s been three weeks since Quynh drowned them. Three weeks too long. 

…

His sons died young. They die young. They are dead and will always be dead, and it is the cruelest thing that Booker’s ever done, burying them. 

He has done cruel things since, and he will do terrible things later, and it will not matter: he has already done the worst thing that he’s ever imagined doing.

(Do you know what it does to a man to plumb the deepest darknesses of his soul?)

…

Booker hopes that she isn’t hanging about that place. He also- because he’s a selfish human being as well- wants her to be there, because as much as Joe and Nicky and Andy are  _ better  _ fighters than him, none of them would have the viciousness needed to really put Quynh down for long enough to escape.

None of them  _ have had  _ it, and Booker will have the element of surprise on his side.

…

If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s sneaking into places that he shouldn’t. Nicky’s good at shooting people from afar and Joe’s the best at hand-to-hand in a crowd and Andy’s the best at literally everything else, but Booker can walk into the fucking Louvre without being seen if he decides he wants to with nothing more than fifteen minutes’ notice and a decent ballpoint pen.

…

The next morning, he goes to buy diving gear and finds out that he’s out of cash. When he digs through his bag, vainly hoping for a wad of cash hidden somewhere, he finds the shirt-piece that Sasmita had given him, heavier than he expects. Booker rips the seams, searching, and sees a number of coins that spill out: metal ones, stamped and rusted-old.

Ancient coins.

Clearly forged, but only to an eye that knows what to look for. Booker finds a stupid enough fence for it within the hour and returns to his diving gear, grabs a boat that looks low and small and easily-ignored, grimaces up at the rainy sky, and sets off to the island of interest.

...

He uses the fog as a shield, and dives down swiftly. But there’s not three iron maidens at the bottom. Booker loses a good thirty minutes of his hour’s worth of air in searching for three metal objects, only to realize the murky thing that’s half-buried in sand is the actual one and the other two are nowhere to be found.

He breaks through the chains by the simple expedient of using pliers.

The person inside isn’t Nile, though. Booker feels a ridiculously massive surge of gratefulness that it’s too dark to really see how he reacts, because it’s fucking  _ Nicky  _ that crumbles out of the iron maiden when he gets the door finally open.

Nicky. 

Nico. 

Fucking Nicolo di Genova, who’s  _ definitely  _ going to stab Booker as soon as he realizes who’s come to save him. 

Booker’s so lost in his dread that he doesn’t realize that Nicky’s not swimming up: he’s just sinking, face-first, into the sand.  _ Jesus,  _ thinks Booker miserably.  _ If he doesn’t kill me, Joe will,  _ and hauls him up by the armpits to the surface, ignoring the burn in his muscles.

But their boat’s gone,  _ again.  _ Stupid fucking governments with good radar. Booker isn’t looking forward to the swim back, and he definitely isn’t looking forward to hauling Nicky back either. Especially when the idiot’s decided to die halfway up to the surface and provide literal deadweight to Booker, who has honestly gone through enough already.

Chucking the plan to keep his face-mask on until they reach land, Booker strips it off and lets his grip on Nicky slip just enough that he gets a faceful of salt water.

“Listen to me!” he howls, and Nicky jerks, staring at him, some spark in his eyes brightening. “Shore!  _ Shore!  _ I cannot drag you! Swim!”

“Libretto?”

_ Oh,  _ fuck  _ off,  _ thinks Booker furiously, and shouts, as loud as he can, “Do  _ not  _ make me slap you!”

They set off swimming, and it’s just as depressing as Booker remembers, dying over and over again. It’s a little easier if they make sure the other doesn’t die at the same time: they can tow them or keep them at the surface, at the least. But the two times that Booker drowns and then wakes well-underwater, he panics wildly before he sees the dark shadow and manages to drag himself towards Nicky. 

The place where they actually end up is beneath a dock, and Booker nearly weeps when he’s got solid ground under him; he can’t believe that he has to do this a whole two more times.

“Booker,” says Nicky, and his hand tightens in Booker’s suit, drags him further up the sand. 

_ Which,  _ thinks Booker sourly, letting himself be manhandled,  _ you know. Didn’t expect fireworks or anything while you were still sopping wet, but a little thank you would’ve been nice. _

“Where are the others?”

“I don’t know,” says Booker patiently. Or, as patiently as he can, which isn’t _very;_ Booker knows his virtues after a lifetime of picking at his flaws, and patience has never been one of them. “I thought they’d be with you- took me three weeks to get this far. Also, I thought you were Nile.”

Nicky’s face spasms. “We have to find her. And contact Copley, and- and  _ Andy-” _

“Yes, yes,” says Booker, extracting Nicky’s fingers from his suit and then flopping on the sand, adrenaline fading enough to leave him tired down to the bone. It feels almost like death, really, this exhaustion; he’s unsure whether he’ll wake up from death or just normal sleep when he opens his eyes next-

Then the damned adrenaline resurges, because, right, no  _ normal  _ sleep for Booker right now, it’s even more fucking dangerous than the damned drowning that it had been from before. Booker forces himself upright, takes a few unpleasantly wet breaths, and starts stripping off the wet suit, sporadically hopping to one of the shops and buying the cheapest clothes he can barter off of them. When he returns to the beach, Nicky’s still lying there, staring off into the sunset.

“We’ve got to go,” he says. “I’ve got a hotel room booked near here- you up for a walk?”

Booker’s hoping that Nicky will say no, because he doesn’t want to walk the two kilometers there; he’s also hoping that Nicky will say yes, because it’ll delay their inevitable conversation that much longer.

There’s a reason why he doesn’t lead a lot of missions.

Nicky looks up at him, glass-green eyes looking ground up, like the glass in a Parisian gutter, just visible as glitter instead of the sharp edges that it had once been. “Is this supposed to be redemption?” he asks, and immediately winces after, one hand flying to his throat.

“Saltwater fucks up throats badly,” begins Booker.

“Answer the question,” says Nicky sharply.

Booker laughs, low and bitter. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, and hauls Nicky to his feet, and starts pulling him to the hotel.

…

Later, after they’ve both washed off the sand and salt and gotten some hot tea from the downstairs- with milk, Nicky specifies, not water- they settle on the single bed.

“I wasn’t being ridiculous,” says Nicky, but he does sound less belligerent, at least, which is better than Booker had been expecting for someone who’s sense of temporal scale is always, the smallest bit, a mess. “Why’d you come back?”

“Because you were at the bottom of an ocean,” he says flatly. “I’m not actually that much of an asshole that I’d let you all drown when I could stop it.”

Nicky pauses. “How’d you find out about us?”

“Nile called me before she was taken.”

“Oh. That was... not very recent.”

“Not all of us are as efficient as you,” says Booker wryly, and sighs when Nicky’s shoulders go rigid. “Yes, yes, you hate me. Do you want me to go and leave you to find the other three on your own?”

Nicky glares at him. “Let me just say that you are the most- most  _ arrogant,  _ most-”

“Scold me in Italian,” Booker offers. “I think it’ll work out more of your frustration.”

“Booker,” he hisses.

“It was an offer,” says Booker slowly, and holds up his hands before Nicky  _ actually  _ strangles him; he certainly looks capable of it. “If you want me to go, I will: you were the ones to banish me, and it hasn’t been a hundred years yet. I’m sorry if you didn’t want to see my face, but I wasn’t going to sit back and let it happen until my exile’s over!”

_ I didn’t think drowning over and over again for eternity was preferable to  _ seeing _ my face, but then I’ve never been that big on loyalty either. _

“We’re going to find the others,” says Nicky, with such venom that Booker almost recoils. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, right, I hear you. I was the one that went searching, if you’ll remember.”

“Right,” says Nicky, and suddenly he doesn’t sound angry; just tired. 

Just as tired as Booker has been feeling for the past few hours.

He leans backwards on the bed, stretching his arms out. Booker winces, though he has the presence of mind to keep it off his face; someone needs to keep watch, and he’d hoped- selfishly- that he’d not have to take the first one. But Nicky has definitely gone through the worse trauma, so Booker resigns himself to getting another cup of tea and a few more hours of sand grinding into his eyes.

It’s not quite a full hour when Nicky gets up and splashes some water on his face. He sighs, loudly, and nudges Booker with his elbow towards the bed.

“You’ve still got a couple hours left ‘fore your watch,” says Booker. “Take it: you look like shit.”

“I will not be sleeping tonight,” says Nicky. He presses a finger to his temple, wincing. “Better one of us have the rest than none.”

“Right,” says Booker. “Okay then.”

He stumbles over to his bag to retrieve the pills. 

They’re all highly controlled substances, which is why he’d spent fifteen very long years in the early sixties getting the licenses for shipping them cross-border, and then set up a neat international supply chain that he can now dip into whenever he so desires. There had been a very nice farm in Belize that he’d used for getting the  _ real  _ compounds up until the fucking country got an extradition treaty to the US and shut it down; nowadays, Booker has to accept the more chemically synthetic stuff he gets from dealers. 

Still, it’s better than nothing.

“What is- are those  _ drugs?”  _ asks Nicky, sounding so horrified that Booker actually looks at him.

“Er. Yes?”

“Don’t tell me that- you cannot- Booker, if our exile made you-”

Nicky has spun right past the horrified look at Booker to looking horrified at  _ himself,  _ and it’s all a bit much for Booker’s sleep-deprived, utterly exhausted brain until he realizes that he usually goes to the bathroom for this bit- or hides it in his palm and does some sleight-of-hand to swallow it without letting any of the others know what, exactly, he’s doing.

“Not your exile,” says Booker, when Nicky finally sputters out of words to stare at him. “I mean- I’ve been taking them for a long time now. Don’t worry about it.”

“A long time,” says Nicky slowly.

Clearly, he isn’t going to stop worrying about it. Booker sighs, disgusted with the state of the world, and drops onto the bed so he’s looking at Nicky, the drugs still clutched in his palm even if the packet remains unopened. 

“You know I don’t sleep well.” Booker rolls his shoulders:  _ what can a man do?  _ “Do you remember when I returned to Clotilde after everything? I could sleep with enough wine, but she didn’t like who I became with drink. So… I tried looking for a better option.”

“And you found drugs.”

“Not these, exactly,” says Booker. “Less effective ones to start with: better ones now. It helps that our bodies cannot maintain a tolerance.”

“They  _ can,”  _ says Nicky. “The amount that Andy drinks- and I saw, with Joe in the fifties. The only way… to…” He trails off, and the horror in his gaze hasn’t lessened one bit. “Please tell me that you do not kill yourself over this, Booker.”

“I just need to keep increasing the dose over the course of a month,” Booker tells him. “It gets lethal every- thirty days, if I’m doing it properly. Then it’s back to the smaller dose. Believe me, Nicky, I’ve got it down to an art. If there’s a single person on this earth who knows of a better way to ensure dreamless sleep, they’ve got to be fucking magicians or some shit.” Shrugs, loosely. “I could get three doctorates over this stuff, probably.”

Nicky’s still staring at him. “Why could you possibly want to kill yourself once a month over  _ sleep?” _

And that-  _ that-  _ is the height. 

Booker rolls his eyes, getting back to his feet and emptying out the pills: he’s on the twenty-seventh night, which means the doses are getting large enough that he can’t take the pills dry. It’d felt strangely like a laugh when he finalized it to thirty doses about sixty years ago; thirty pieces of silver, representing one of Booker’s many, many useless deaths. Representing seven hundred-odd deaths in the intervening years. The joke lies in all the roles that Sebastien le Livre plays in this farce: he is Jesus, dying and being resuscitated; he is the priest that hands over the silver, bloodthirsty and vicious; and, of course, he is Judas, remorseful and pitiable and still bitterly, awfully treacherous.

“Please,” he says tiredly. “Let’s not pretend to more stupidity than we possess.” Scrapes up some humor, because Booker’s really more tired of the truth than he is of anything else. “I mean, we’ll need some intelligence to figure out where Joe and Nile are; better to get your practice in on me.”

“Libretto,” says Nicky, very, very quietly. “What do you see in your dreams?”

“With these?” asks Booker, holding up the bag. “Jack shit.”

“And without them?”

It’s all so terribly gentle and soft, and Booker very abruptly wants to fling the pills out the window, and himself, and Nicky, too, because he’s  _ bad  _ at this,  _ bad  _ at redemption,  _ bad  _ at being good,  _ bad  _ at pity, and he just wants-

“Libretto,” says Nicky, so it sounds like a puff of air instead of a name, and Booker- 

-gives in.

“My family,” he says, defeated. “My sons; my wife. Their anger. My deaths. Their deaths. All those things I- I’ve done. Andy, now, after the whole thing with Merrick.” 

He swallows, and suddenly Nicky is there in front of him, sitting next to him, and his hands are on Booker’s wrists, warm where nobody has touched him in fucking- months. 

“The dreams began before those things, though,” says Nicky, in French. 

“We dream of each other,” says Booker, and closes his eyes so all he can see is darkness and the after-image of the lamp, gold and grating. “We dream of each other until we meet. Tell me, how has Nile dealt with Quynh’s drowning?”

Nicky lets go of him, and Booker relishes the cold air on his wrists as much as he loathes it:  _ Here is the image of a pathetic man, _ he thinks, wildly,  _ driving away those who love him for no reason other than the sharpness of his teeth _ . Then he looks up, and Nicky’s face is waxen, like something just slowly returning to life, like someone in immense pain and unable to do anything but bear through it.

“You said the dreams faded,” he whispers.

Booker laughs. “I lied,” he replies. Nicky turns towards him, and there’s a flare of anger on his face- he’s always so expressive to those who know him- and Booker laughs again, unable to contain it. “I lie, Nicky. It is what I do. Didn’t you know that about me?”

“Not to us,” he bites out. “Not to family.”

“I didn’t lie to my family,” says Booker airily, rising to his feet and strolling to the bathroom. “And  _ they _ all died cursing me to their grave. Believe me, I can learn from my mistakes.”

He locks the door and stares into the grimy mirror, hunching over the sink. The pills in his hand have been crushed to white powder, but Booker figures- why the hell not? It’s not like he’s got any dignity left, anyways. He licks up the strip of powder on his palm, washing down the chalky taste with the rusty water that runs from the sink, and then stares at himself in the mirror until consciousness leaves him.

The last memory that Booker has is of the redness of his eyes, and the tears standing out in them like beads of reflected gold: paltry and stupid and shallow regret, weighted on his spine like all the other mistakes he’s made in his long, long life.

…

He wakes up two hours before dawn, stumbles outside and sees Nicky folded into the most uncomfortable chair in the room. It’s not like he has much of a choice- there’s only two of them- but he could’ve, at least, sat on the bed, which is more comfortable by far.

“Booker,” he says, and if nothing else, Booker’s glad he’s stopped using the nicknames. “Do you have any leads?”

So they’re pretending last night- or, more accurately, a few hours ago- didn’t happen. Good to know. Nicky can choose the strangest moments to get stubborn.

“I piggybacked a facial recognition query on multiple satellites to get  _ here,”  _ says Booker. He sighs at Nicky’s blank look. “It was difficult enough to find you; I have to go back through the videos to see if there’s anything I missed about where she took the others.”

“We can both see the videos,” says Nicky. “You’ll set up? I’ll get the coffee.”

“It isn’t even five,” says Booker wearily. “Nothing’s going to be open yet.”

Nicky flexes his hands, looking marginally more frustrated now than sad. Booker will chalk that up as a victory: he’s never dealt well with grief, both his own and everyone around him. 

“We should be searching for Andy, too,” he says quietly.

Booker draws up one leg, hugging it to his chest, then switches it out for the other. “How’s she been dealing with mortality?”

“Badly,” says Nicky, and smiles faintly, like he can’t stop it. “We have to keep telling her to slow down: she cannot do as much as she did before. But she keeps saying that she doesn’t have enough time left to waste it on patience.”

“That sounds like her.” Booker pauses, then says, “Well, actually, it’d sound more like her if she told it to you while she cut off the head of whoever told her to slow down.”

“It wasn’t  _ me  _ that said it,” says Nicky.

“Love only goes so far, eh?”

“When asked to choose between family,” says Nicky piously, “I try not to make enemies.”

“Nicolo di Genova,” mocks Booker, because he’s never not taken the bait offered up to him on a silver platter, “smartest man in town. Who knew?”

Nicky ducks his head, laughing a little, and Booker almost laughs too; but then he feels something rip through the fleshiest part of his innards, sharp as a serrated knife: all the memories he’s given up, all the things he’s sacrificed, all the things that aren’t aren’t  _ aren’t  _ fucking worth it. And he’ll lose this, too, once they’ve found the others.

_ Fuck,  _ but he’s a stupid man.

He turns away, goes to the window; lets the cold morning air wash away some of the pain.

“If she isn’t dead yet,” he says quietly, “I’m going to find her.” Then he turns to Nicky, and holds his gaze: glass-green, like the Greek fire of the ancients. Booker’s always been very good at using his pain to accomplish things. “I promise you that.”

“She isn’t dead. Quynh was not… kind. Or sane. But she would not kill Andy.” Nicky pauses, amending: “She would not kill Andromache.”

“Keep that faith,” says Booker, and Nicky’s gaze sharpens on him, but Booker refuses to flinch under it any longer. “We’ll need it.”

“And you?”

“Me,” says Booker, and snorts. “I’ll do what needs to be done. No need for faith when you’ve got enough desperation.”

Nicky’s back to looking sad. “That is not an easy life.”

“No,” says Booker. “No, it fucking isn’t.”

…

What he means is,  _ I haven’t chosen easy for the entirety of my lifetime.  _ What he means is,  _ I have known more desperation in the past two hundred years than you have in a thousand.  _ What he means is,  _ Sometimes I think I scrape my hands bloody and grate my heart out on the bones of those I love because I know of no other way to be. _

Redemption, Nicky had asked him, and he had laughed: because what does a man like Booker know of redemption?

…

They watch the videos. Nicky goes to retrieve coffee and sweet pastries a bit later, after the street fills with the voices of the vendors. They make a list of places to check- which is to say that Nicky makes the list, based on places he remembers Quynh mentioning- and, after the list grows too long, figure out a way to monitor those locations without actually visiting them- which is to say that Booker hijacks an unmanned submarine to explore various parts of the South China Sea and further south, nearer to the Philippines. It causes a relatively major diplomatic incident and is all over the radio chatter that Booker’s passively monitoring, but Nicky doesn’t notice it and Booker doesn’t actually care.

In the meantime, Booker’s got to go to Belize.

Nicky insists on joining him.

“We stick together,” he says, in that tone of voice he gets when he isn’t going to change his mind come hell, high water, or the deathless insane woman completely intent on, apparently, drowning him to a permanent death. “I’m not leaving you behind anymore, Basti.”

“Okay,” says Booker. “So long as you promise not to use that name  _ ever again.” _

“What, Basti?”

“Yes,” he says through gritted teeth. “That one, which you absolutely cannot pronounce.”

It’s not even Nicky’s accent; he’s actually not bad in French, and is far better than either Joe or Andy in terms of sounding like a native-speaker, albeit someone from Lyon and not Marseille. It’s more that pronunciations have changed over these centuries: the name his wife and his family once called him is no longer the same one that people use when saying Sebastien, and Basti is too close to that for comfort. And Booker doesn’t mind leaving it behind at the altar of his family. Sebastien le Livre  _ is  _ dead: he died with the death of the last of his sons. Booker is a different man, a sadder man; a more broken man.

Is it melodramatic?

Well, Booker’s never claimed not to be melodramatic.

“Fine,” says Nicky, but there’s a glint in his eyes that says the conversation isn’t finished. 

Booker rolls his eyes, and swipes the bag over his shoulder, and hails a cab to take them to the airport.

…

His sons had been- not easy, and Booker hadn’t been the greatest father. Particularly after returning from Russia, newly undead. He knows this. He’d been too impatient and too lenient by turn, and all too often lost in the misery of his new abilities. His sons had inherited both his and Clotilde’s temper, and it hadn’t been easy, dealing with sleepless nights and terrifying abilities and the vicious, seeping envy of his family while still being shit-scared of leaving them and losing one moment of their lives.

He’d buried two of them with Clotilde; Jean Pierre had lived for the longest, and even that had been younger than Booker when he died for the first time. Clotilde had died just a few years before the last of their line perished, and it’d been the one thing that Booker had been glad for, knowing that he wouldn’t have to hold her through the long nights once more, weeping and weeping until he could not taste the difference between the salt of his tears and the salt of the sea.

_ You will know what it is to lose everyone you’ve ever loved,  _ he’d said to Nile, and meant it too, but this is what he does not say:  _ I could lose them all, over and over again in a hundred lifetimes and more, and never once would I turn away. It is a cruel world that asks fathers to bury sons, but I have never imagined this world to be less cruel than it is. I was there: I was  _ there,  _ when they wept, when they laughed, when their eyes darkened never to be bright again, and there is not a single person in this world that can take that from me. _

…

Do you remember? There are people that do not treat love like a fever, like a wounded animal to be coaxed to the hearth for healing. Nile is one of them. 

Booker is not.

Oh, oh, Booker fucking  _ knows. _

…

“So, what’s in Belize?”

“One of my safehouses,” says Booker, in an old Bulgarian dialect that probably only he and Nicky and Joe really know any longer; he’d learned it from Nicky over that terrible Russian winter, trying desperately to focus on something other than the cold and the creeping death and the even more insidious knowledge that death would not erase the pain of the cold. “Also, a woman who owes me a couple of favors.”

“Favors,” says Nicky slowly.

Booker lifts a shoulder. “Yeah.”

“And this’ll help us find Joe.”

“No,” says Booker, stretching out his legs as much as he can in cramped economy seats. Maybe he should’ve sprung for business class, but seeing the quietly dismayed look on Nicky’s face at their mode of transportation has been the highlight of his day thus far, and Booker’s certainly not above such petty joys. “But it’ll help us find Andy. I think.”

…

Belize is not just a safehouse, though. 

Booker thinks that Nicky understands that when they walk into the home: it’s nothing like Booker’s other safehouses, which are usually dust-ridden and moth-worn, just barely stocked with clothes and non-perishable foods, unadorned walls and cold floors. But there are some carpets here, and curtains, too; mismatched dishes tucked into the polished cabinets, cracked clay statues in the gaps of the bookshelves that represent some terrible attempts at reinventing Rodin-esque sculptures.

“Booker,” says Nicky.

“Get some sleep,” says Booker. His voice sounds rougher than it should.  _ Tiredness,  _ he tells himself, and pretends that he believes it. “I’ll get some sheets- you’re in the first room down.”

It’s the one house in which he’s maintained sheets and blankets in vacuum-sealed covers. It’s the one house that Booker has that, even if untouched for another hundred years, will remain liveable, because he’s thought of every possibility and warded against it.

Every possibility but this one.

This is  _ Booker’s  _ house, and Nicky’s an intrusive, unnecessary ghost hanging over it, smudging fingerprints over all the glass-etched memories of his family. The sourness and bitterness on Booker’s tongue is just as familiar as it is unwanted, but he can’t stop. Instead, he grabs the sheets and returns, passing them over to Nicky.

The room he’s offered to Nicky’s the one that Booker uses least often in the house, which was why he’d chosen it. But Booker had forgotten  _ why  _ he doesn’t use this room.

“Your son,” says Nicky, as he inspects the plaster-of-paris mold that Booker’s placed on the side-table. “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” says Booker. “You recognize him?”

“I see you in him.”

The simplicity catches in Booker’s throat, like blackberry thorns on soft flesh. He breathes in, out, and nods. “Take some rest, yeah? There should be some dried foods in the kitchen- I’ll get some fresh stuff for dinner tomorrow.”

“I did not know you were a gardener,” says Nicky wryly.

“Life would be a hell of a lot easier if I was,” retorts Booker. “No: I’m going into town. Have to meet with Lydia anyways.”

“Lydia’s your contact?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be up.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do.”

“Nicky,” says Booker. “Look. This is my contact: she isn’t going to like meeting with people other than me. Like, paranoia doesn’t fucking  _ cover  _ it.”

“Okay,” says Nicky peacably. “Then you might have to give her some more money to guarantee that you’re actually not selling her out. You have the cash, don’t you?”

“That- that isn’t the point!”

“You’re right,” says Nicky. “The point is that I’ll be coming with you tomorrow.”

Booker sags against the wall. He’s  _ really  _ not in the mood for this. But Nicky isn’t either, and Booker knows this, because Nicky gets more intransigent when he’s pissed off, voice going smoother and smoother and smoother still, until it’s like- like- like fucking liquid helium or something. 

For the first time in months, Booker misses Joe’s temper on a visceral level. There's only one thing worse than Joe shouting at you: Nicky being a stubborn fucking asshole, avoiding confrontation like a slippery eel.

“If it’s something to do with,” he begins haltingly, “I don’t know- not trusting me- or- or- something like that- I just want you to know that- well. I’d never do anything to fuck up our chances of finding them. Honestly. I’ll swear it on whatever you want- if you’ll believe my word- I don’t know- but- but.” He swallows, sputtering out of words, and closes his eyes briefly. “I’ve drowned every night for two hundred years, Nicky. I don’t wish that on anybody. Not on my worst fucking enemy, and you and Joe and Nile- you aren’t- you aren’t that.” Opens his eyes, and looks at Nicky, even though it feels like he’s splitting his innards open with it. “You can trust me for this.”

Nicky’s staring at him: he hasn’t stopped since Booker opened his mouth. His face is half shadowed by the dim light; Booker had left the lights out of the bedrooms here because his house in Marseille had never had indoor lighting, though he’d caved and installed them in the hallway after fracturing a foot in the dark. But the fluorescent lights are dim at this distance, and give him absolutely no help in understanding whatever Nicky’s feeling, no matter how expressive his face might be.

“Libretto,” says Nicky, so softly that Booker almost thinks he dreams the words. “I have never doubted your ability to complete a mission since Russia.”

Russia? Booker feels strangely dizzy.  _ Russia? _

“Right,” says Booker faintly, and turns to stagger off to his bed. 

He’s stopped by a hand on his shoulder. When he turns, Nicky looks- strange. Very much unlike what Booker’s seen before on his face.

“I’m not lying to you.”

“I… didn’t think that.”

“For someone who claims to be a liar,” says Nicky amusedly, “you do not lie very well at all.”

“Nicky-”

“Do you remember those people in the church? The one that got set on fire by accident?”

“In Russia?” Booker tries his absolute level best not to curl into Nicky’s grip. He’s already pathetic enough. “That wasn’t an accident: it was idiocy. Whoever decided to store tallow next to the fucking cowshed-”

“Well,” says Nicky, interrupting him loudly, “you saved more people than any of us that day.”

“Because you’d been giving me more food. I was just stronger.”

“You did what you could. Which is all we’ve ever asked.”

“Don’t,” says Booker lowly, and pushes himself away, no matter how it feels like he’s ripping one of his own limbs off. “Just- don’t, alright? I don’t- I know I messed up. I know you didn’t ask for more than necessary, I know it was on me. I  _ know  _ it. I can’t change what I did, Nicky. I never can.”

“Yes,” says Nicky. “I know that. I know that now.”

“Then-”

“This isn’t about trust,” he tells Booker. Steps forward, and reels Booker into an embrace that makes something aching and trembling and awful click in the back of Booker’s throat. “We are brothers; we are friends; we are something the world has no name for. But we do this together, Booker, or not at all. Do you understand me?”

Booker sighs, and nods, and feels Nicky’s arms drop away like a benediction and a curse all at once. 

“We are  _ not  _ the fucking Musketeers,” he says, and his voice wobbles so much that he feels shame curl under his belly like a venomous snake, fangs scraping against his insides. “No matter how much you and Joe would like to be.”

“No,” says Nicky. “No, we are not. We are something better, yes?”

“We’re fucking  _ something,  _ alright,” says Booker, and finally moves away. 

He’s almost at his bed when Nicky calls after him: “Please don’t make me stake out the car, Libretto. I wish to sleep tonight. Properly.”

“Oh, fuck off,” retorts Booker, and kicks his door shut with a vengeance that barely takes the edge off his irritation. He raises his voice to be heard over it: “I agreed, didn’t I?”

“Body language can be misconstrued!” Nicky calls back cheerfully.

“Shut up and get some sleep,” orders Booker, but he’s leaning back on the bed and he’s smiling into the curve of his bicep, covering it from even the stars peeking through the window. 

It feels- exhausted. But a cleaner kind of exhaustion than he’s felt in months, or years, even. The low-grade, ever-present misery replaced with the quiet anticipation of a job well done. Hope isn’t something that Booker knows well, but it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t recognize it, or that he rejects it out of hand.

He looks out at the stars: they shine down on him like a thousand diamonds, like a hundred-thousand frozen tears embedded in glittering velvet. Booker imagines what Clotilde would say, seeing him now: his grief, his idiocy, his laughter. He imagines telling her that he’s built this house for their family, from the ground up made as an homage to their boys and her memory. 

Love is not a fever, perhaps, but it feels like an illness when there is nobody left to give it to. Booker imagines it like a half of his heart, bloody and red and raw: set into Clotilde’s beautiful hands, passed into the dust of Clotilde’s grave. When love becomes grief what is he supposed to do? What can immortality do to heal a heart given away freely?

_ I miss you,  _ he thinks, and kisses the tips of his fingers, and raises them to press against the cold glass of the window and the eternal stars shining above them.  _ Oh, sweetheart. I miss you so, so much. _

…

They head out the next morning, both of them feeling better; Booker chokes down some dried-up fruits and hopefully mycotoxin-free nuts before they get in the car. By the time they get to the prearranged meeting point, he’s awake enough to enjoy the cold air.

“Nicky,” he says abruptly. “You need to- let me do the talking in there. It’s- very important.”

“You need me to do some acting?”

“Just- be like Joe. When he’s really pissed off at someone.”

“Grumpy Joe?” Nicky’s lips twitch. “I can do that.”

Booker breathes in deeply and gets out of the car. Heads inside the art gallery, which shouldn’t be open at this time of day. It’s not much; a very modern, sleek kind of place, with the paintings on the white walls and the sculptures tucked underneath their canvas protectors. Nicky shadows him closely.

It feels almost more invasive than Nicky being in his home. Booker’s spent the past two centuries- well, not  _ hiding,  _ exactly, his love for art and his ability in it, but certainly not making a production of the business. It’s something he’s good at: a fact he’s simultaneously ashamed and proud of. And it’s always been easier not to have to confront all of those tangles by the simple expedient of skipping over the entire topic.

“Augusto!”

“Lydia,” says Booker, relieved, turning to meet her. “It’s good to see you.”

Lydia’s a tall woman, with rich hair dyed a riot of colors spilling down her back. Her hands are stained with a similar number of paints, as well as the simple tunic that- to Booker- certainly looks irreversably ruined.

“I can’t believe you’re back,” she says effusively. “I was telling Magda- you remember her, yes?- just a few weeks ago that I didn’t think you’d come back. But then she said that you’d dropped by before the rains began?”

“I did,” says Booker, strangling the urge to look at Nicky, who’s standing uncomfortably stiff behind Booker, right in his blindspot like the petty man that he is. Booker consoles himself with the knowledge that  _ Nicky’s  _ not the one who knows Lydia, which means that the reason for vibrating with tension right behind Booker is more because Nicky’s irritated than anything worse. “In January. It was a very short visit. Just making sure everything’s up and running.”

“I’d give a lot to buy that apartment off of you,” says Lydia, for probably the tenth time in the past two years. Then she shakes her head. “But you know that already, don’t you? Tell me, who’s this one? Your-”

“-brother,” says Booker smoothly. “We wanted to take vacation together: get away from the family. All that stuff.”

“You look nothing alike.”

“Different dads,” says Nicky, and when Booker turns to glare at him, he smiles like the fucking angel he isn’t. “Our mother was… very prolific.”

“Oh,” says Lydia.

“She was also a  _ very  _ smart woman,” says Booker forcefully. “And I inherited all of the brains in the family. Sadly.”

“Um,” says Lydia, before smiling. “I think this is the most I’ve ever learned about- you, Augusto, in all these years.”

“I am an open book,” says Booker. At Nicky’s snort, he shoves an elbow backwards and, rather desperately, changes the subject: “You’re going for indigenous art this year?”

“There’s quite a few good pieces that were identified at a site a few miles away,” she replies. “It came out to be a decent deal: the archaeologists wanted the exposure, and I could get access to pieces that’ve never been seen before.”

“Anything interesting in them?”

“Some. Would you like to see the catalog?”

Booker pauses. “We haven’t had breakfast, actually,” he says slowly. “Do you happen to have some coffee upstairs?”

Nicky makes some kind of a noise in the back of his throat- indignation, probably from Booker’s rudeness- but, in a gift from the god that Booker doesn’t believe in, doesn’t say anything. Lydia stares at him for a moment and pales, a little.

“Not the coffee you like, I’m afraid,” she says carefully. “But it’s close enough! I’m sure it won’t make much of a difference.”

“Lydia,” says Booker, and smiles, and switches to proper Greek so she understands him perfectly. “I really like that coffee. When I come here- I need that coffee. Do you understand?”

She’s gone perfectly white at the smile, spine growing stiffer and stiffer until she looks like a plank of wood. “Yes,” she whispers.

“We’ll wait here,” Booker tells her. “While you get that coffee.”

“Okay,” she says, and then jumps up the stairs. 

Nicky eyes him. “That wasn’t about coffee.”

Booker sighs, sliding down to sit on the floor. “You think?” he asks sardonically.

“What is it?”

“A software,” says Booker wearily, tipping his head back. Christ, but he wants a drink. “D’you remember New York ten years ago? The- ah- American government launched satellites that can be used to identify people anywhere in the world- it’s still the world’s most sophisticated tracking software. If it can be used.”

“We stopped them, didn’t we?”

“Stopped the software,” corrects Booker. “Corrupted it. But the satellite was already launched. And there wasn’t anything we could do about that.”

“Then this is… what?”

“Russian agencies tried to hack that satellite five years ago. Lydia’s girlfriend- or wife, I’m not sure if they got married- stole  _ their  _ software. I found out and got Magda set up here as a thank you for, you know, not making my life really fucking difficult.”

“And now you’re asking for the software,” says Nicky. He shakes his head. “She isn’t going to agree.”

“Let her try.”

“Booker-”

“My name’s Augusto.”

“Well, yes, I meant to ask why you decided on  _ that  _ name- it’s really not subtle at all- and-”

“-I was pissed off at Andy when I chose it,” says Booker, tips his face up to look at Nicky, and sees the light of humor in it; grins at him. “Just because  _ she  _ knew fucking Augustus-”

“-you’re such an idiot,” says Nicky, but it’s said with such affection that Booker can do nothing more than roll his eyes.

Then Lydia comes down. “She doesn’t want to,” she whispers, fingers clenching on the banister, drained white. “I’m- she’s very sorry, Augusto, but- Magda’s saying that- she won’t give it to anyone. It’s buried here, and will remain buried here, and-”

“Right,” says Booker. Clambers to his feet. Nods at her. “That’s our answer then,” he tells Nicky, and strides to the door. Pauses, one hand on the handle. “Lydia, do you know where we can find the best eggs in town?”

“There’s a store down the corner,” says Lydia, looking stunned at his easy acquiescence.

Booker tips his head at her. Gets some eggs, and then gets in the car, and then drives to the studio apartment that Lydia and Magda still think is his only home in Belize. Nicky winces at the bare walls- they must look all the worse after seeing Booker’s real safehouse- though he doesn’t say anything.

“You have a plan,” he says. It isn’t a question.

“Yes,” says Booker anyways, and smiles a smile full of teeth.

…

It’s a simple enough trap; humanity’s been doing it for thousands of years. A trap older than Andromache of Scythia, really: if you cannot hunt the prey down in the underbrush, you must smoke it out. Give it a panic far worse than yourself.

There’s no actual Russian special force marching down on Belize to retrieve Magda, but Booker blankets the channels she’s monitoring with carefully edited snippets of said data. A woman looking for a conspiracy is often going to find one; Booker’s not above taking advantage of that fact.

Two days later, Nicky- who’s been trailing Magda and Lydia in his usual discreet manner- calls Booker.

“She led me straight to it,” he says triumphantly. “I’ll meet you in ten?”

“Actually, meet me at home,” says Booker. “I’m clearing out of here.”

For a moment, there’s no answer; he worries that the line’s gone dead. Then Nicky crackles to life: “Sure thing, Libretto.”

…

His identity as Sebastien le Livre is burned in the Congo through a mixture of personal arrogance, Andy’s overbearing need to  _ do  _ things, and a series of mistakes that trickle down from the desk of Leopold the  _ fucking  _ Second himself. The bastard’s not actually on good terms with France- Booker relies on that fact to keep his name and identity intact while working in non-French controlled borders- but somehow there’s an administrative agent who connects a couple dots and, after capturing Booker, starts taunting him with a number of things about Marseille.

Booker doesn’t  _ often  _ lose his temper; there’s already enough hotheads on the team with Andy and Joe, and Nicky isn’t far behind Joe when it comes to making snap judgments and reacting badly. But there’s something in the bloodless viciousness of this man, trying to tarnish the only good memories that Booker’s ever had, that rubs him the wrong way.

When the other three burst in to save him, Booker’s painted the walls red and burned all of the man’s documents in a vain hope to keep any of his lackeys from using his work. He’s also in the process of throwing himself into the fire and hoping the death will stick this time, but he’s unsure if Joe realizes it when he drags Booker out.

“Sebastien,” Andy says, loudly, and Booker doesn’t think, doesn’t breathe, just moves the fastest that he’s ever moved in his life to take the ragged piece of metal lying next to his hand and slash her throat open.

She dies, and Joe and Nicky go absolutely still, and Booker finds sanity, finally, in the midst of that awful silence. When Andy comes back to life, he’s still standing above her, clutching the metal close. 

“Don’t call me that,” he croaks out.

“Okay,” says Andy, a strange look on her face. 

It’s Nicky that comes to him, and wraps a hand around Booker’s shoulders: the blood has been burned off, leaving the skin pure as if it’s never been unclean. It makes something shudder and yaw in Booker’s belly, a monster that he’s never known before.

“Libretto,” he says, and it sounds, strangely, like _little brother._ Like _family._ Like forgiveness, and gentleness, and kindness too, and it hurts even as it stitches something closed in Booker’s still-raw chest. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

…

The software works like a sweet, sweet gem. Booker only needs to use it for one night- he finds where Quynh is down to the smallest detail. Andy’s there, too. Nicky goes to put it back so that Magda doesn’t realize what they’ve done. Booker decides to take a walk: their flight’s in the morning, and he doesn’t really feel like sleeping.

When he returns, it’s almost dawn. Nicky’s on the porch, legs spread out before him, sharpening his sword with slow, relaxed movements. Booker settles next to him. 

“You call this place home,” says Nicky quietly, when Booker doesn’t break the silence.

Booker closes his eyes. “Do I?”

“I’ve never heard you call anything a home apart from the one in Marseille. Everything is- Safehouse One, Safehouse Alpha. Never home.”

“I did build this place,” says Booker, running a hand over the grain of the wood idly. “You know I built the home with Clotilde- I built this one, too. Put in everything that I wanted. Everything that I could.”

“You never brought us here.”

“I mentioned Belize a hell of a lot.”

“We thought- sun. You always were very French about the weather.”

“Oh, don’t start,” says Booker, laughing. “As if Joe’s any better in the cold!”

“He’s not,” says Nicky, and smiles. “You laugh more here. It’s- I think I’d forgotten how you sound when you laugh. It suits you.”

Booker slumps backwards, so his head’s resting flat on the wood and he can see the clouds above him: painted scarlet and gold, slowly darkening to white. “Jean Pierre died in ‘43. Do you remember when I joined you?”

“That same decade, at least.”

“You aren’t wrong. ‘49.”

“Six years later?”

“I was very busy with not killing myself.” Booker grips the wood of the banister until it feels like it’ll splinter in his grasp, though he keeps his voice light. “I- I spent three years drowning in alcohol. And other things.”

“Quynh?”

“I’d gotten the drugs by then, so no.” He pauses, because the comforting zing of Nicky’s sword has stopped, too; only continues speaking when Nicky continues the sharpening. “But I wanted better ones: I started a farm here. Experimental one. Researched as much as I could on- you know. Plants. Shit like that.”

“You sound very smart,” says Nicky, in that tone of voice that’s so innocent it’s more suspicious.  _ “Plants. Shit like that.  _ Let me guess: you invented a new field of science, and now you just don’t want to explain it to me.”

Booker drops an arm back to flop over his eyes. “I will never understand how Joe could fall in love with a mindreader.”

“I’ve always known him to be very stupid,” agrees Nicky.

“Oh, don’t bother,” says Booker, forcing himself upright again. “I know you’re both as grossly in love as the other. It’s really fucking annoying.” He sighs, then goes on. “But I mean. You aren’t wrong. The plants were  _ very  _ good. Top quality and all that. I knew I wasn’t going to return to you lot until I could sleep without screaming, and- and you were all such light sleepers, much lighter than Clotilde or my sons. I needed better things than whatever I had then. Which was why I studied it.”

He glances over at Nicky, who’s back to looking upset. Which Booker really doesn’t understand: he’d been so considerate, really, and Nicky  _ still  _ looks like he’s managed to skin their imaginary cat.

“We wouldn’t have minded if you- couldn’t sleep,” he says finally, careful as the rasp of his whetstone on the sword. “Joe and I would have- we’d have helped. We’ve seen it with Nile: how she suffers. We wouldn’t have been angry with you. You know that, don’t you?”

“People get tired of pity,” says Booker, looking away from him to the fields in front of them of tangled shrubbery. He owns a lot of this land, and most of it is greenery too thick to drive through, the house tucked within like a nut at the heart of a shell. It’s so fucking beautiful. “And that first winter was difficult for Andy, do you remember?”

“Yes, but-”

“Joe didn’t lie back in that lab,” Booker tells him gently. “I am selfish. I am a liar. But beyond everything else, Nicky, I’m a coward.”

“Really,” says Nicky, looking unimpressed.

“Really. My wife could not bear my nightmares, which was why I began trying to find ways to stop them. But they hurt Andy more than ever they could hurt Clotilde. And by the time I returned to you three- I had nobody left, do you see? Nothing left but my grief and my fear.”

Now, Nicky just looks vaguely sick. “Is that what you thought of us? That we would- abandon you? If you told us about your dreams?”

“I thought you would not see me the same way,” says Booker. “I thought- that I would represent your mourning, and I could not bear it; I had enough grief of my own. Not that you would abandon me. Never that.” He reaches out, grips Nicky’s shoulder, which tenses immediately under his hold. Booker lets go, feeling a strange, distant sting of hurt; but then, he’s the one who sold them out, so how can he expect forgiveness so quickly? “Just that- I know too well how the little things can break a relationship. My immortality was a bridge too far for my sons. Why would my dreams be less for you, who owed me nothing and shared no blood, only this- this immortality?”

“Nothing left but your grief,” says Nicky slowly. “That’s what you said in Merrick’s lab. Not  _ grief and fear.” _

Booker shrugs. “I needed Andy more than she needed me. Not reminding her of the woman she left to drown for five centuries was the least that I could do.”

“You thought she understood you.”

“Andy? Yes. She did. Does.”

“Why not me? Why not Joe?”

“Because- how can you know what it means to lose sight of your guiding light when it’s right in front of you?”

“You’re wrong,” says Nicky softly.

“Maybe.” Booker shrugs again. “It is what it is.”

“Sometimes,” says Nicky, setting the sword down and looking actually properly irritated, “I wish you would try to look at something other than the worst outcome.”

Booker makes a noise deep in his throat; he doesn’t know himself if it’s one of agreement or not. Slowly gets to his feet. 

“We’ve got to get going. You packed?”

Nicky sighs. “Booker.”

“I need to put some stuff away. I’ll meet you at the car in fifteen.” 

He escapes to the kitchen swiftly. Tries to keep his mind blank and calm as he wipes the dishes and switches off the water and electricity. When he finally gets back to the car, Nicky’s waiting for him. Booker sits down, places his hands on the steering wheel. Breathes in, breathes out. Looks back at the bones of his home, which he has built from the ground up in the fashion that his wife would have loved, which he has filled with all the things that his sons would have enjoyed. Tries to inhale some courage with its sight. 

“Sometimes,” he blurts out, “I wish I had more incentive to see something better.”

…

When he’s stabbed Nicky, broken Joe’s elbow, and only slammed to a stop because of Andy’s uncompromising grip on his jaw, she says to him:  _ You cannot spend your entire life running. _

It’s winter. Booker sees, over Andy’s shoulder, the other two healing, blood the only remnant of how badly they’d once been injured. The nausea hits him hard, but Booker’s spent long enough in the snow-ridden plains of Russia to know not to lose what little food remains in his belly; he doesn’t know when he’s going to get his next meal. These strangers are like him but not  _ like  _ him: they’re used to whatever they are. They’ve accepted this- this curse, or this blessing, or whatever he wishes to name it- where Booker can only imagine fighting against it.

Booker bares his teeth at Andy as best as he can: bloodstained and shining and sharp enough, he’s learned, to tear out a wolf’s throat if he gets desperate enough. 

(Desperation, of all things, has never run in short supply in Booker’s life.)

_ Watch me,  _ he says, and Andy shatters his jaw for his troubles.

…

On the way to the airport, he gets a signal from the unmanned submarine that’s still been monitoring the ocean: a two-toned beep that’s assigned only to that. Booker stops driving and pulls over. Looks out into the rich vegetation, not at Nicky. This isn’t fair to them. This isn’t  _ fucking  _ fair to them, having to choose between Andy and Joe and Nile.

This shouldn’t be a choice.

“I found Joe and Nile,” he says quietly. Doesn’t reach for the phone. Keeps from wiping his hands on his jeans despite their clamminess. 

“You- what?”

“I know where they are. The phone- I just found them.”

“Oh,” says Nicky. He doesn’t say anything more. 

“Nicky,” says Booker. Swallows, hard. “You should- you should go to them.”

“And what will you do?” asks Nicky, with that flat curiosity that means he doesn’t actually care for Booker’s response; he’s already made up his mind. “While I save our family.”

“I’m going to get Andy.”

Nicky inhales slowly, chest expanding; Booker remembers how painful it’d been to drown on their way back to the mainland. If he had someone to bet with, Booker would put down enough money to buy entire islands that Nicky’s imagining Joe, still drowning alive.  _ Hopefully  _ drowning alive, because the alternative is- is too terrible to consider.

“Not Quynh?”

“I’m a selfish bastard,” says Booker, with the faintest ghost of a smile. “And family isn’t transitive. Just because she means something to you doesn’t mean she means anything to me. Hopefully I’ll be able to stop her for long enough to get Andy out.”

“You’ll need to be careful,” Nicky says heavily. 

It’s the only permission that Booker’s going to get, but it’s more than enough. He nods curtly and starts the car again, continues driving to the airport where they’ll have to split up. 

Probably never to see each other again for a century. Booker shoves that thought to the back of his head viciously: he’s got to keep it  _ together  _ for at least another week. 

Just one more week.

…

His second phone buzzes with a text just before Booker takes off:  _ Be careful. I mean it, Libretto. _

He’ll deny the smile on his face to his dying day.  _ Tell me,  _ he texts back.  _ Did you pull your punches with her? _

When he lands in a private hangar in Belgium, there’s a text waiting. 

_ Yes,  _ Nicky sends.  _ Don’t make the same mistake. _

…

Of course, love has never been Booker’s downfall.

…

This is untrue. Love has  _ always  _ been Booker’s downfall. Too much love has always been his downfall. But here is the thing that happens when you treat love like a fever: there are only so many people you are willing to die for. 

This number does not, as one might imagine, go up the longer you live.

…

Quynh’s disappeared, taking Andy with her: but she isn’t a native to the world of disappearing, not like Booker, who’s spent the past two hundred years developing more and more sophisticated methods to keep his family off the grid. Sure, he hadn’t done  _ such  _ a good job that a dedicated ex-CIA agent couldn’t follow the dots, but Booker hadn’t been that paranoid either.

There are advantages to the rapid industrialization and globalization that Booker’s kept himself on top of, that Quynh has no experience in.

Of course, sheer bloodyminded stubbornness and a complete lack of care to the deaths caused along the way can even the playing field a bit, but Booker’s still got a lot of chips stacked in his corner. Including his ability to sneak into anywhere that he wants.

Quynh’s currently renting a villa tucked into Brussels’ outskirts, eerily close to the Schonenberg in a way that sends prickles up Booker’s spine. He takes a minute to really shake it off- he can’t afford to make mistakes now, not with Andy needing him- and then starts moving in.

There aren’t any guards. Booker doesn’t expect any: how can Quynh trust them? But there’ll be security in the form of electronic monitoring- Booker’s certain of that, at least- and he cannot tip his hand before he’s absolutely ready. It takes him two days to set it up: a monitoring station in an uncomfortably tiny blindspot, a sniper’s perch in a tree that takes him nearly fifteen hours to approach and scale properly.

Then it’s just a matter of Booker figuring out where things lie inside.

Andy doesn’t appear the first three days. When she does limp into view, Booker feels himself flinch hard enough that the scope dips away. By the time he gets it back, she’s gone again. He sees her again the next day, bruiseless, eyes closed as she presses her face up to the sun like a flower pleading for light. It isn’t much of a sight. But it gives Booker enough peace of mind to finally fall asleep on the fifth morning, lashed onto the branch, safely cloistered away. 

He wakes up on a cold, damp floor, in the darkness, hands tied behind his back.

Booker sighs, bending forward to stretch out his cramped shoulders, and thinks, wearily:  _ Here we fucking go. _

…

“If you could die,” Booker asks Andy in 2018, drunk enough that he’s on the verge of slipping into sleep, drunk enough that everything tastes of salt and breathlessness; not drunk enough to actually choke on the dream yet. By the time he gets to that point, he’s going to be in his own room: it’s the least that he can offer Andy. “If you could die, would you choose it?”

It’s after a bad mission in Cape Town: they’ve made it worse, violated international treaties, complicated the peacekeeping process. Andy’s called for a year-long moratorium. Joe and Nicky have already gone off to recover. Booker’s flight’s not for another couple hours; Andy hasn’t mentioned what she plans to do, but she also hasn’t said no to the rum that he offers up.

Andy laughs. Drains the rest of the bottle. “You have to ask?” 

As Booker finds out a year later, he  _ does. _

…

Quynh kills him eighteen times before starting her questioning.

The drowning seems to be a theme; Booker doesn’t, actually, mind it as much as Quynh probably thinks he does. Drowning is- almost- a comforting thing when compared to all the things that he hates more than it: it burns his nose, and his lungs, but at least it’s not as bad as having to grow back  _ limbs.  _ That shit itches like nothing else. 

“Why are you here?”

“Because I’m going to get Andy out.”

“You’re  _ not,”  _ hisses Quynh. “It doesn’t matter what you do, do you understand? She is  _ mine,  _ I am  _ hers.” _

“Yes, I’m sure she’s said so,” drawls Booker. Takes a deep breath. Another. Dislocating fingers one by one is such a fucking bitch of a task. “Does she know I’m here? Or are you afraid she’d change her mind the second she realizes that you’re killing her family?”

He takes the knife to the lungs with admirable calm, and slips his broken fingers through the bindings, ignores the pain to grip Quynh’s ears- or he’s supposed to; he ends up holding one ear and a hank of hair on the other side of her head- and twists hard enough to break her neck.

There’s nowhere else he can go; his ankles are still bound, and Quynh’s going to wake up too quickly for Booker to escape. But the satisfaction remains in his gut, even as she breaks his neck over and over again, barely giving Booker’s neck time to crack back into place before she’s doing it again.

…

_ Promise me,  _ Clotilde had said, when she was grey-haired and gasping on her deathbed, grip still so tight on Booker’s hand.  _ Promise me you’ll love them. _

She knows he’ll love their sons long past their deaths; Clotilde’s never imagined him to be less than what he is. So Booker doesn’t know what she means then, and he doesn’t know what she means when he buries her, and he doesn’t know what she means when he buries Jean Pierre, and he doesn’t know what she means when he betrays Andy and Joe and Nicky.

Now, caught in the grips of a woman he’s given himself over to, a woman mad enough to kill him and keep on killing him until long past Booker’s well and truly dead, Booker finds that he  _ does  _ know who the  _ them  _ is, and it is, as always, too little and too late of a realization.

…

Booker doesn’t know how much time has passed; he’s passed it in pain, gasping alive, shuddering to death. But then he feels the rumble and grunt of the machinery, and he cannot help the grin. Quynh, who’s been in the process of trying to carve Booker’s heart out of his chest with a very rusty and dull knife, freezes.

“What is that?” 

“In your time,” Booker pants out, “I believe that would be called the cavalry.”

Quynh’s nails dig into his ribcage- the bare bone. It hurts like nothing else. “You rescued the others?”

“Yes,” says Booker. Gasps when she breaks two ribs. Keeps on going. “But this isn’t them. Did you think I only knew three people?”

“You don’t  _ like  _ people,” snarls Quynh. “You work alone!”

“Well. True.” Booker licks his teeth, where Quynh’s dislocated his jaw three times over the past hour. “But desperation makes people do crazy things, and you’ve made me very,  _ very  _ desperate.”

“What have you done, Sebastien?” asks Quynh, pressing a hand under that jaw, lifting it so he can meet her eyes.

Booker grins at her. “There’s some information that half the world’s countries would sacrifice everything to get,” he tells her. “And they all think it’s buried on your property. Congratulations, Quynh. Really. You’ve got about a half hour before ten different agencies try to break down your door.”

“This is only going to get me to run.” Quynh releases him, stepping back. “I don’t understand why you would-”

“Because,” says Booker, forcing himself up onto his elbows and continuing to grin at her with his red-slash mouth.  _ See?  _ he thinks half-hysterically.  _ You’re not the only horror hanging about this place. _ “You’ve got a couple choices here. See, those men are going to want to find that drive, and they’re expecting one person to be in the house when they come. So. You can either stay here and get captured- because you will; they’re going to shoot you and take you in- or you can leave alone, or you can leave with Andy.”

“You’re free now because nobody  _ knows  _ about you! Why would you give up your  _ freedom  _ to-”

“Desperation, remember?”

“You’re mad.”

“Let Andy go,” advises Booker, and runs his tongue over the hole in his jaw where the tooth’s growing back.  _ God  _ but it’s itchy. “Or get captured all over again by people who won’t stop until they’ve figured out your immortality.”

“What’s to stop me from running with her?”

“They expect one person here,” he says. “You release Andy, and I’ll let you leave this room without any issue, and the agencies’ll find me.”

“I’ll go after her again,” says Quynh, with all the terrible gentleness of a sea before a storm. “I will catch her again. She is mine- I am hers. Nothing you can do will stop that. Particularly not while locked up.” 

“You don’t have Nile’s dreams anymore,” says Booker. Ticks down all the things. “You don’t have the element of surprise. You don’t have the advantage of numbers. And I’ve prepared them as best as I can.” He nods at her jerks of impatience. “Do you understand?”

“You’ve told me what you’ll do if I release Andy,” says Quynh. “Not what you’ll do if I don’t.”

Booker bares his teeth at her, bloody, bloodthirsty, and remembers wolves in Russia, fire in the Congo, cold steel and glass in London. “There is nowhere you can go that I will not find you,” he says, and laughs, even as Quynh dislocates his jaw a fourth time with a furious kick. A breath, shallow, before it pops back into place, and he grins up at her again as insolently as he can manage. “Andy shattered my jaw when we first met. Though I suppose she did have some more time.”

“I did not want this,” she hisses. “I wanted- I wanted-”

“I know,” says Booker, as kindly as he can while his lung’s still healing. She glares at him, and he lets his face soften with understanding for the first time, so she knows he’s not being facetious. “I know. Why do you think I let you see my dreams, and where I was, the night that you captured me?”

“Let,” says Quynh blankly.

“Did you think I forgot to take the pills that night by accident? While on your property, hidden in a fucking tree?” Booker blinks. “I mean, I’m sure Andy’s told you a lot of things about me, but not that I’m stupid.”

“It was implied,” she growls.

Booker snorts. “Andy told you that I don’t like working with others,” he says. “But she didn’t tell you that I do a hell of a lot of things I don’t  _ like,  _ because if I only did things I like, I’d probably have thrown myself in the ocean to deal with your fucking deaths.”

“Sebastien-”

“Booker,” he corrects. “That is my name.”

“I don’t  _ care-” _

“I know, Quynh: I know. You want it to end. You want there to be a reason. You want a balance.”

“I cannot ask it of a god,” hisses Quynh, “but you think I can’t demand answers of Andromache?”

Booker feels the jolt of bones finally cracking into place, the skin healing over for the first time in days; the sudden absence of the agony feels almost like something comforting’s been taken from him. “She doesn’t have the answers,” he says. “And she never will, no matter how much you demand it.”

“You-” Quynh pauses, then, like she’s realizing something. “You’re delaying.”

“Now? No, I’m not.”

“For Andy,” she breathes. “Another few decades and she’ll be gone, if she has that much- and you’re keeping them from me for that time.” She laughs incredulously. “You, who betrayed her- you think she’ll take  _ anything  _ from you any longer?”

That does hurt, because he doesn’t, actually, think that Andy will accept it, not from his ruined, silver-tainted, unscarred palms. Flight’s never been her style. But Booker fights with what he has, and sometimes it isn’t guns or steel or fists: it’s with the thorned, bitter pains singing through his heart. And sometimes one man’s penance is, in the end, enough.

“I’m not asking her to take,” says Booker. “I’m giving her a choice. Just like I’m giving you one.”

“This isn’t a choice,” she says.

“If you hadn’t dropped the others into the ocean,” he replies dryly, “I would’ve offered better options.”

“She called you a  _ coward,”  _ says Quynh, and that is the cruellest cut of them all.

Booker takes the word in himself, swallows it without resentment, and nods at Quynh. “I am,” he says calmly. “Whatever else Andy’s done- she hasn’t lied to you about me.”

The cellar’s dim; Booker might be mistaken. But he doesn’t think he is: Quynh’s eyes are shining with tears. Like she’s been betrayed. Like she’s afraid of losing what she’s scrabbled up out of the pieces of her old life. It would be pitiable, if Booker had room in his heart left for pity.

“You,” says Quynh, before turning away, “are wrong.”

…

Once she’s gone, he picks the lock with some of the bone fragments from his own ribcage- they’re rather obligingly the right shape; one of them’s even got a decent hook on it- and then walks through the house, making sure it’s empty. It’s cleared out hastily, but the point is that it’s cleared  _ out.  _ A quick check-in to the blindspot that he’d set up and a glance at the security camera he’s installed across the street from their only Brussels safehouse reveals that Andy’s in it alone. 

So at least the only person who’s going to have to face the fucked up mess the house is going to become in a few minutes is the one person who really deserves it. Booker thinks it’s rather a shame for some of the art pieces to go to waste, as they surely will in the firefight; he inspects a vase and sees that it’s actually authentic Ming-era pottery. There’s nothing he can do about it now, though. All his tricks are played out. No more cards up his sleeves.

Just Booker, bare-faced and ragged, more flesh and bone outside of him than inside: Booker the monster, Booker the traitor, Booker the coward, Booker the liar. 

He sits down in the plushiest chair he can find, drinks straight from the bottle of a rather dry 1700s cognac- Booker doesn’t actually  _ like  _ it, but it’s rare enough for him to find a wine older than him, and he’s starting to feel like he needs some of the liquid courage after the hell that’s been the past days- and waits for the special forces to steal him away.

There are Russians hanging about, and Americans, and Chinese, and Belgians too, probably having caught wind of the sheer promise of action due to proximity. Booker waits them all out. Whoever comes to him first is going to get  _ him,  _ and that’s almost a better prize than the drive.

He doesn’t actually know who finally bursts in, or how, or even when.

Just wakes up hours later, in a dark room, hands once again bound behind his back. Booker laughs, and laughs, and laughs again, chest rusted through and grief gone sour. He keeps laughing until whoever’s kidnapped him stabs him enough to collapse his right lung, and there’s literally no breath left for Booker to make sound.

…

Booker dreams: the afternoon they’d walked out of Strasbourg with all their earthly possessions in their arms and he’d wept into Clotilde’s hair, and she’d held his cheeks within her cool palms, and she’d kissed him like she was trying to climb into his body. The beaches of Marseille, rich and golden; the blazing heat of the summers, which he’d never really gotten used to. The thick smell of roses from their windowsills. The garden he’d planted in Belize that he’d never been able to give to Clotilde, rich in gardenia and jasmine and rosemary.

_ Where’s the drive? _

He dreams: his sons, young-and-old at once. Laughing. Beckoning him towards them, on a bridge of sunlight and silver. 

_ Where’s the drive? _

He dreams: wolves, and blood, and pain like both a benediction and a curse. 

_ Where’s the drive? _

This is the truth at the end of all things: Booker’s monsters have never been more terrifying than him.

_ In Leopold’s fucking tomb,  _ Booker says, finally, after he’s got blood in his eyes, got blood in his teeth, the blood in his bones cracked out and seeping into the walls.  _ You’re welcome, motherfuckers. Go ahead and desecrate  _ that,  _ if you’ve got enough balls for it. _

Then he dreams: fire and flame and fury, so terrible it snatches the vestiges of life from him, leaving his dreams dark, and dark, and dead.

…

When Booker wakes, wherever he’s been stashed is crumbling apart and there’s ash still floating in the air, fires despondently licking at some pieces of wood that haven’t been destroyed already. His bonds have been burned off, but the chair beneath him remains miraculously structurally sound. He debates escaping; it’d be easy enough amidst the confusion of whatever’s happened.

But  _ why  _ should he?

He settles back and cracks his neck. Rolls his shoulders. For the first time since 1812, his dreams won’t be of drowning, and Booker intends to take full advantage of that fact. He closes his eyes, and lets the drugs still pumping through his system have him.

…

The next thing he knows, someone’s slapping his face. They’re also screaming, very loudly, in his face, and as terrible as his torturers had been, they hadn’t been so rude as to shout at him like this, spittle in his face and hands very inefficiently trying to cause him pain when compared to bullets or knives.

Booker opens his eyes grumpily to see-

-Joe.

_ Right,  _ he thinks resignedly.  _ Back to the drugs, then. _

He’d just been in the middle of a rather lovely dream with Joe, in a far better setting: it’d been a forest, and Joe had been telling him about… forgery, and Booker had gotten excited about teaching Joe something right up until he realized that Joe was discussing forging techniques, as in forging  _ sword  _ techniques, and Booker’s excitement had drained away.

“We’ve got to go,” he thinks Joe’s shouting at him. 

Booker sighs. “Yes, yes. I know. Stay calm. No need to scream.”

_ “Booker-” _

“I did want to visit New Zealand,” Booker tells him. “The cabin in the woods is nice, but that seems more your speed: I’m a river-man, you know? And it really is a shame not to, but. There you have it. I’ve heard so much about it- honestly, I’d love to see some of their mountain lakes. Switzerland’s good and all, but it gets frozen over so  _ quickly.” _

“Booker.”

“Clotilde would’ve liked it. She never did like the cold.”

_ “Booker!” _

“Oh, fuck off,” snaps Booker. “The least you can do is let me finish  _ talking,  _ I listened to you go on about your sword for ten times as long!”

“We’ve got to leave, you daft moron! There’s no time for your-”

Something shudders, and the rapport of gunfire rings through the room. Booker rolls his eyes.

“Yes, yes, escape- where to this time? Jakarta? Madrid? Chennai? If it’s Laos again, I’ll tell you that they’ve got a warrant out for me still. I’ve checked.”

They don’t, but he fucking  _ loathes  _ the mosquitoes there. They’re smaller than the rest of the world, and manage to somehow suck out more blood. And for some reason, their immortality doesn’t fix mosquito bites.

“If you make me drag you out of here,” says Joe through clenched teeth, “I’m going to be really fucking pissed.”

“Oh, like  _ that’s  _ a surprise,” drawls Booker. “There’s a very nice answer for that, my darling Yusuf. I’ve given it already. Fuck. Off.”

“That is  _ not _ an option.”

“Look,” says Booker. “Look. The hallucinations have gotten better! I mean, the drugs they’ve given me aren’t making me relive my deaths, like most of the shit they tend to have on hand. Could they be better? Yes! But I’m learning to count my blessings.” He pauses and frowns at Joe, who’s staring at him, jaw all but hanging to the floor. “Now that  _ is  _ rude,” Booker tells him. “What, me being grateful’s the thing that’s going to make this an unrealistic dream, is it? I once spent a good forty minutes thinking gravity’s a repelling force and reimagining the universe, and me being  _ grateful’s  _ what’s going to test the drug’s limits?”

Joe swallows, gathering himself. “Booker,” he says slowly. “I’m not a fucking dream.”

“If you were, you’d be a hell of a lot nicer. That’s why they call it a hallucination.” Booker snorts. “Eight centuries more than me, and you still don’t understand the concept of synonyms?  _ Similar,  _ not the same.”

“I,” says Joe, taking a gun and slapping it into Booker’s hand, then turning to shoot the three men stomping through the door, “am really,  _ really  _ real. Do you understand me?”

The blood splatters over his face and beard, and it’s that which convinces Booker: he never imagines the others as having anything other than the cleanest of hands and faces. He never has been able to. 

Very slowly, Booker curls his hand over the barrel of the gun. Stares at it, then up at Joe, and tries, valiantly, to resist the urge to curl up into a ball and shrivel up. 

“Yes,” says Booker, faintly. “I. Er. You’re. Here?”

“Oh, thank fuck you’re on board.” Joe’s shoulders drop a little. “You with me?”

“Wait. Wait- you’re not  _ supposed  _ to be here.”

“Book-”

“You’re not supposed to  _ be  _ here!” says Booker, voice slowly increasing in volume until he’s shouting. “What the- fucking- you’re supposed to be  _ safe-” _

“Out of curiosity,” says Joe, “where did you think I was?”

“Timor Leste!” Booker bellows. “Where I’ve set up your identities! And put down a dozen false trails! And allowed you to survive!” He shoots one person sneaking up on Joe’s blindside and levers himself to his feet, ignoring the wave of dizziness that threatens to swamp him. “You absolute dickhead  _ bastard-” _

“-oh, I’m the bastard, is it-”

“-you don’t need to save me!”

“That would be more convincing,” says Joe, “if you hadn’t been in the middle of a bunker that got destroyed by a missile and still  _ sat  _ there like you weren’t planning on escaping!”

Booker rolls his eyes. “Let me be clearer then, because you obviously aren’t capable of understanding me:  _ I don’t want to be saved.” _

“You were being tortured!”

“Yes, as if  _ that’s _ the worst thing that’s ever happened to me!”

Joe recoils. Stares at Booker.

In the pause, Booker realizes something else. “Tell me that Andy isn’t here,” he demands.

“Andy’s on the fourth floor,” says Joe slowly. “She should be clear by now.”

“Goddammit.” Booker presses a hand to his eyes; pinches the bridge of his nose. “You do realize that I had everything set up perfectly, don’t you? You four would’ve survived! Without any issues!”

“And you would’ve been a neat little lab rat for whoever caught you.” Joe loops Booker’s arm over his shoulders and drags him out into the hallway. “Which. As said. Isn’t an option.”

“Joe!” snarls Booker.

“You’re hampering my left arm movement, Libretto. Come on now. Lift the goddamn gun. We’ve got to get to the second tunnel before Nile can blow it up safely.”

“Nile can blow it up safely now, and nothing’s going to happen,” Booker points out. “We’ll still survive.”

“We’ll die and then, hopefully, come back. Which isn’t to say that it’s a guarantee.”

“That’s only,” says Booker pleasantly, “because you don’t have a death wish, Joe.”

“But you do.”

“I lie to others.” Booker spreads his arms; makes himself big. Takes two bullets to the back for it, but doesn’t really do much more than wince, and, anyways: those are two bullets not in Joe’s body. “Not to myself.”

Joe shoots the man who shot him and drags Booker forwards, pushes him up against a wall and crowds him close. “Right. Fine. Drugged to high heaven, got that bit. Can you please find a  _ shred  _ of survival instinct before you get both of us killed, Book?”

“I,” says Booker, “am not the one who walked into a black site without backup.”

“No,” Joe bites out. “You just got carried in on a fucking  _ stretcher.” _

“By choice!”

“Yeah, well, you make shit choices.”

They stumble a bit further: out into a fourth hallway, which they clear by the simple expedient of throwing a grenade and then ducking away. Joe snarls under his breath when three men still make it out; he takes one of them with a neat gunshot between their skull and the second merits the scimitar, barely unsheathed but still sharp enough to cut off the man’s hand at the wrist. Booker takes the third man himself, wrestling him for his knife and then stabbing it into the back of the man’s neck. 

Then they’re in a fifth hallway- it’s a fucking  _ maze,  _ this place- and Booker’s swaying in and out of lucidity. The worst part’s how much he knows he’s out of it: he tries to pistol-whip one man only to end up using the wrong arm and therefore slice his face open, and then tries to throw the knife but actually hurls his gun at the man. He then tries to wade into the morass of limbs to get the gun back, but Joe’s got his arm tight on Booker’s waist and isn’t letting go.

“Snap out of it,” Joe says loudly. “Would shooting you help get the drugs out?”

“You think I haven’t been getting shot?” Booker demands back. “Where the fuck have you  _ been?” _

“I meant-” Joe stops talking when they turn a corner to see twenty men heading in their direction. “-right. Okay. Book, you need to- fucking- I’m going to need you to help out right now. Okay?”

Booker laughs breathlessly. “I told you to leave me behind.”

Joe backs up, so they’re going to meet the men in the slightly narrower hallway; the smaller area’s a decent method in limiting their numbers, and Joe’s probably thinking that they’re the ones with the advantage in closer combat. Booker growls under his breath and swings out at the boxes stacked nearest to him, collapsing them onto the floor and giving them some decent temporary shelter.

Joe eyes him. Then he says harshly, “Seriously, Booker. This’s getting pathetic.”

“I  _ know  _ what I-”

“You think your kids would like who you’ve become?”

Booker stares at him, ears ringing. 

It’s been 177 years since Jean Pierre’s death, and they have never spoken about Booker’s family. Not as a joke, not as a sign of respect.  _ Never.  _ Jean Pierre, Clotilde, Claude, Raphael:  _ never.  _ Booker doesn’t have much that he considers sacred. He’s always found humor in irreverence, and both he and Joe have enjoyed many years of annoying Nicky with their jokes. But his  _ family- _

And for  _ Joe  _ to be the one to do it! Joe, who’s seen what happens when Booker feels his family’s being mocked, who’s seen how Booker slaughtered his way through seven terrorist cells in Beirut without anyone’s help, who’d been at his back when Booker absolutely demolished that druglord in Johannesburg, who’d dragged Booker out of the fire in the Congo and watched him kill Andy for the first and only time: how  _ dare  _ he. How dare he!

Booker finds that there’s a gun in his hand that wasn’t there a moment earlier. 

He lifts it, aims at Joe’s knee, and shoots.

“Mother _ fucker,”  _ snarls Joe, going down to his- unshot- knee. After a moment, he lifts his head and scrabbles upright. Booker readies himself for a fight- Joe  _ hates  _ getting injured by anyone he knows, taking the pain as a personal insult; when Booker broke Joe’s elbow the first time in Russia, he’d taken it on himself to teach Booker hand-to-hand and exacted a  _ very _ painful vengeance in the form of ten broken elbows over the next week- but Joe only stares at him very, very hard. “You with me now?”

Booker blinks. “You- what?”

“Adrenaline gets the heartbeat up. High heartbeat flushes the drug out faster.”

“You meant for me to shoot you!”

“You thought you were the only manipulative one in this family?” asks Joe snidely, before he turns to shoot the first man to burst through the makeshift barricade. 

Booker snarls. “Oh, you  _ fucking  _ asshole-”

But he’s moving easier, and his mind does feel a lot less fuzzy. At least he’s able to aim better than just a few minutes earlier. He steals a couple knives off a clearly knife-happy idiot after Joe cuts open his guts, and follows Joe into the all-out melee, slashing open the throat of the man who’d got Joe into a chokehold and then throwing his next knife into the eye of the guy who shot Booker in the thigh.

When they’ve finally cleared it out, Joe slumps against the wall. Booker closes his eyes; he’s so fucking  _ tired.  _ Then he hears Joe chuckling, and opens his eyes, because- well, if Booker’s going to have to look Nicky in the eye and tell him that his beloved’s lost his mind, then Booker’s going to want the proof for it.

“You know what would’ve been hilarious?” asks Joe, still vibrating from suppressing his laughter. 

“No,” says Booker slowly, though he’s got a terrible feeling in his belly.

“If I’d lost my immortality right then-”

_ “-stop-” _

“-and you’d shot me just like Andy-”

“-shut  _ up-” _

“-only for it to happen again!”

“I really, really hate you,” says Booker. “Also, why d’you think I aimed at your knee and not, you know, somewhere more important?”

Joe steps towards him, grips the side of his head. He doesn’t seem to mind the blood and bone currently coating Booker’s skull, but then Joe’s never minded viscera in the same way that Booker and Nicky do.

“Maybe,” says Joe. “But you cannot deny that it would’ve convinced you that the universe really was against you.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Perhaps now you’ll believe the opposite?”

“You fucking asshole,” says Booker. “That is not how logic  _ works,  _ you can’t just- converse statements don’t-”

“-inverse, actually.” Joe grins at him. “I’ve studied maths for longer than you’ve been alive, boyo. Don’t try to discuss the secrets of the universe with me.”

“You believe the secrets of the universe begin and end with Nicky’s fucking cock,” says Booker flatly, but he doesn’t pull away from Joe either. After a moment, he says, “I can’t believe you said that. About- my family.”

“Yeah, well. You deserved it.”

“And you deserved to be shot.”

“Maybe,” says Joe, unrepentant, and then, even as Booker starts to roll his eyes, shoves him through the glass window at his back.

…

Booker breaks one arm and his collarbone on impact, but he’s got enough instincts to keep rolling and at least avoid shattering his femur. He flops to the ground when he comes to a halt, aware distantly that the bones are knitting together in that peculiar manner Booker’s never been able to put into words. Then Joe’s there- the bastard’s taken the stairs, as far as Booker can tell; he hasn’t gotten any broken bones, at least- and he’s hauling Booker up, practically steering him into a tiny car. 

“We’re calling it the Nile.”

“Oh, are we?” asks Booker, content to rest his head on the cool glass and keep his eyes closed. “Back in my day we called it defenestration. Used to be reserved for politicians, too.”

“Kids these days don’t know the worth of things, eh?”

“Exactly! If you start throwing all the layabouts you find through windows, what’re you going to do to those people that really deserve it?”

“Pah,” says Joe, voice sounding strange. Booker almost opens his eyes to see what Joe looks like, then thinks better of trying to move; his head’s throbbing like he’s spent the previous night guzzling down three different bottles of gin. “As if you’re just any layabout, Booker.

“I should be insulted,” says Booker dryly. “I’m not half as bad as Martinice was, really. Wasn’t he the one whose second wife died the same year as their marriage?”

“No, I meant-” Joe sounds frustrated. He heaves a heavy sigh, and then says, grimly, in old Arabic, “I see what Nicolo meant when he said I’d need patience.”

“A conquering virtue,” says Booker, in proper, Chaucerian English, and Joe growls under his breath, releasing the steering wheel to cuff Booker over the head.

Booker, who’d expected it, snorts, keeps his eyes closed, and shuffles his entire body as close to the door as he can get it. 

…

He falls asleep, and doesn’t wake until Joe opens the door and causes Booker to spill out onto the street. 

“Come on. We’re here.”

“Oh,” says Booker, and sighs, plucking at his shirt. It’s a lost cause; the cotton’s soaked up a hell of a lot of his body fluids, and it’s really hanging onto his body by a few threads, dried blood and a prayer, and now there’s gravel in between the few remaining structurally sound strips of cloth. “Great.”

They step inside, to a room full of Nicky and Nile. Booker considers getting angry at Nicky: the idiot should’ve known better than to bring Joe and Nile back to Brussels, but then Booker’s also spent the past week and a half getting tortured and killed, so he’s going to give himself some leeway.

Then Nicky drives his sword- his longsword, his very heavy,  _ very  _ sharp longsword- into Booker’s foot, and all Booker’s sympathy drops into the negative digits.

“You fucking  _ fucker  _ of a fucked up fuckball,” Booker spits out, as Nicky takes out the sword and he hops over to the nearest thing that’ll hold his weight- it’s a wall, which isn’t a sofa or a chair, but better than nothing. “What the  _ fuck  _ is your problem!”

“That’s for stealing the drive,” says Nicky coolly. “And not telling me about it.”

“It was a fifteen minute ride,” says Booker incredulously. “You can’t tell me you’re pissed about the driving!”

“I don’t like cars,” says Nicky. Joe elbows him, and he amends, “And I don’t like that you didn’t tell me the truth.”

Booker blinks at him. “I’m-”

“God help you if you say you’re a liar,” threatens Nicky, and Booker slams his mouth shut.

Then he opens it again, because, you know, fuck it. He’s not so tired that he can’t shout back. “Look, I’m not the one who completely upended the whole plan to escape Quynh! You- you should be in  _ Timor Leste,  _ all four of you! Not here in- fucking  _ Brussels!” _

“You were captured and held at a black site run by four different organizations,” says Nile, disbelieving, “and you’re blaming us for not running away?”

Joe stalks over to the kitchen and comes out with a number of cannoli that he eats with an impressive amount of anger. “Believe me,” he says, “he’s an idiot.”

“Says the man who tried to get me angry enough to shoot him.”

Joe smiles at Booker thinly:  _ lie in the grave you just dug,  _ shines from his stupid,  _ stupid  _ eyes. “Says the man who actually shot me,” says Joe sweetly.

Nile freezes. Nicky checks himself. Booker swallows.

“I made sure to aim at his knee, just in case,” he says. 

“Just in case  _ what?”  _ asks Nicky.

Joe snickers. “Just in case him shooting us causes us to lose our immortality. Idiot actually thought he could fight his way out of the rest of the place if my knee hadn’t healed.”

“As if you didn’t push me out of a window!”

“We’re even,” says Joe, and bites into a cannoli. “Relatively.”

“It’s not about  _ owing,”  _ snaps Booker, anger still thrumming through him like wine allowed to ripen for too long. “It’s about your  _ idiocy,  _ all three of you: why didn’t you just stay away! I planned it so it would- another forty years-”

“And leave you behind?” asks Nile. 

“I chose it,” says Booker. “I chose that. The only way to get Quynh off our trail was to tell her the truth. The only way to stop someone as desperate as her is to be more desperate. To do something more insane. Revealing myself to the government? Revealing our secret? It was… not the least of what I could do, but also not the most.”

Nile’s staring at him. “Why would you choose-” Then she shakes her head, as if she’s rethinking the question. “What makes this different than surrendering yourself to Merrick?”

“The people?” says Booker, because it’s obvious. He sighs when she continues staring at him. Pushes a hand through his hair, and ignores the face that Nicky and Nile both make when bone tinkles to the floor. “I didn’t take any of you with me, either, which I… surmised was an issue last time.”

Something cracks in Joe’s hand, but it’s just the cannoli; he glares at the cream on his fingers before looking up at Booker. The other two are also looking at him with varied expressions on their faces, some complicated thing that Booker cannot be bothered to decipher when his head aches this much and he’s still got so much to do.

“You thought the issue was because you got us captured,” says Nicky, drawing out the syllables in a way he must have adopted from Nile.

Booker, on the other hand, is French, and cannot believe that Nicky’s chosen to learn this skill after seventeen decades of being beside Booker and  _ not  _ learning it.

“Yes,” he says, obnoxiously, giving it the lilt and breathiness and number of syllables that only a classical native French speaker can manage. “Obviously.”

“Oh my god,” says Nile. “Oh my  _ god.  _ I mean- yes, the problem was half that, sure, but it’s also a problem that you wanted to get locked up, Booker, oh my  _ god,  _ what-” she whirls on the other two, “-this is why I wanted an apology! If Quynh hadn’t come along you’d have spent a hundred years making him feel sorry for the  _ wrong thing!” _

“See?” says Joe. “Stupid.”

“What would  _ you  _ have done, Joe?” Booker shouts, and Nicky startles next to him; drops the sword. But Booker doesn’t bother backing down. Just stalks towards Joe, completely fucking  _ done  _ with this entire mess. He’s done enough. Fought enough. Over and over again, he pushes to help his family and it ends like this: pieces of glitter-glass in a gutter, barely shining, the shards sharp enough to rip a man’s gut open. “I’ve made mistakes! I know that! I can’t undo them! I took a hundred years- and I’ll  _ take  _ a hundred years, damn you- but then  _ you  _ show up again! What the  _ fuck  _ am I supposed to do? Tell me-” he reaches out, grabs Joe’s sticky hand and slaps a knife in it, lifts it to Booker’s collarbone, “-tell me  _ what you want  _ and I’ll do it, don’t think I’ll stop you.” 

Joe’s fingers are so slack on the knife- in a manner that Booker’s never seen before- but Booker’s got his own hands encircling Joe’s, and he isn’t letting go.

“Honest,” says Booker, through a throat dry as bone. “‘m not lying to you.”

“I don’t want to kill you,” says Joe quietly.

“Right,” says Booker. He laughs, low, and backs away. The knife clatters to the floor, but Booker doesn’t bother retrieving it; it isn’t his, just stolen off a hired gun. “Right,” he says again, and goes into the room where his go-bag’s always packed.

…

There’s an adjoining shower, so Booker lets himself indulge; washes out the bone and blood and all the rest of the disgusting stuff off, then pours a liberal amount of bleach down the drain to dissolve the number of solids that have gone down the drain. Wearing actual clothes and being properly clean manages to give him an energy boost, even if it doesn’t help his mood; he just keeps seeing Joe’s face, the wide eyes, the blood on his lips and splashed over his temple. The weight of his fingers on Booker’s collarbone, which he’d broken just a few hours earlier, and the chill of the knife.

Booker rather thinks he’d have preferred to have his throat cut, actually.

When he steps out, there isn’t anyone there, though Booker can hear voices. He goes through the quick process of stripping the go-bag; necessities have changed under the circumstances, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to come back to this house without wanting to throw up, so it’s imperative he gets all assets out with him. 

The change of clothes isn’t completely necessary, though it’s appreciated. The bottles of liquor get tossed- Booker can buy more in Alsace, which is where he intends to go after this; lie low and drink himself to at least three deaths before getting up to anything- because he has more important things to pack. The guns he keeps, because they’ll be good to use with just a little bit of polish. Then he goes to the hidden cupboard that he’d dug into the wall and locked with a lock that has no key- it’s meant to be unlocked by someone with lockpicking capabilities, and the only person who has any in their group is Booker and Nicky, who’s got too much respect for autonomy to pry into Booker’s shit.

They all probably assume it’s more alcohol inside anyways.

With that cheerful thought, Booker loses the last vestiges of patience, takes the gun out, and shoots the lock to pieces.

There isn’t much inside: a fake Matisse sketch that hasn’t aged properly enough in the dark to really fool any but the least experienced art critics, a couple coins he’s nicked off of Andy that are probably the best-preserved Satavahana coins left in the world, and a Bernini-esque bust that Booker’s been working on for the past seventy years. Still, the Matisse will probably sell a decent amount if he reaches out to a fence that he knows in Zurich, and it’ll be enough even with the cut for the middle-man and all to keep him comfortable for half a year at least.

_ “Booker,”  _ says Nile, and he blinks out of his thoughts to look at her. “I thought- we heard-”

“-gunshots,” says Nicky.

“That was me,” says Booker tiredly. Waves to the lock. “Couldn’t find my lockpicks.”

Nicky raises an eyebrow, but Booker ignores him. 

It’s a little harder to ignore Nile when she strides past him to pick up the bust, face so awed that Booker’s left even more uncomfortable.

“This is- beautiful,” she breathes. Glances up at him. “Did Andy give it to you? It is a- Bernini, right?”

“Something like that. And yes.” Booker sighs when Nile blinks. “Right. Well.” He turns, and sweeps the rest of the stuff into the open bag, not caring how they fall; he’ll explain all the tears away later. If there are tears in the canvas. He zips up the bag. “Tell Andy I’m sorry to miss her,” he directs at Nile, simply because it’s easier to look at her than Nicky. “And that I’m a phonecall away if, you know, Quynh comes back. Or something.”

Nile remains frozen for a moment, but Nicky’s smarter than her; or he’s got more experience in dealing with Booker. He’s covering the door- his posture looks relaxed, leaning against the frame, but Booker knows Nicky’s anything but. One wrong move and he’ll probably tackle Booker to the floor.

“Where are you going?” he asks neutrally.

“I’m not sure,” says Booker. “Akureyri’s always pretty this time of year.”

“Do not lie to me.”

“I haven’t decided yet.” Which isn’t a lie, exactly; Booker’s only eighty percent certain he wants to go back to Strasbourg. “As I said, I’m a phonecall away.”

“You are  _ not,”  _ says Joe, appearing over Nicky’s shoulder, “going anywhere.”

Booker tries very, very hard not to flinch.

“It isn’t safe,” says Nile softly. “Quynh’s out there. Andy’s working with Copley to erase all evidence about you, but- they were apparently high up, and there’s a lot of people that might know about your abilities. We aren’t going to send you out into the cold while you might be burned, Booker.”

Booker swallows. “Copley’s dead,” he tells them.

“Copley faked his death,” corrects Nicky. “When Nile didn’t check in, he faked his death and went underground.”

“Oh,” breathes Booker. He stumbles back, and sits down on the bed. He’s so,  _ so  _ tired. Then he looks up, and he sees Joe, again, his eyes so fucking present, and Booker finds a well of strength tucked deep inside of him. “Okay. But. You guys have to know that I can’t stay.”

“And why’s that?” asks Joe.

Booker knuckles at his eyes. “You made the rules,” he says wearily. “And I can take care of myself.”

“Libretto-”

“No,” says Booker. Gets up. Swallows. “Enough. Alright? Just- enough.”

“We don’t-”

“I did shit to you,” Booker tells them. “I know what I’ve done. I know, alright? I know. I know forgiveness takes time. And I’m not going to ask you to speed that up just because- just because of other shit that’s happened. You deserve better. All of you.”

“And what about what you deserve?” asks Nile gently.

Booker smiles at her; can’t help it. She’s so  _ nice,  _ in a way that none of them are anymore. “This stopped being about me a hell of a long time ago,” he says. She looks so unhappy that he can’t quite help the further reassurances. “I’ll be fine, Nile. I always have been. Perks of being an immortal.”

“Booker-”

“When you do something bad,” he says, “there are consequences. There have to be. It isn’t easy, but.” He remembers Sasmita in Bangladesh, flyaway strands of hair flaring gold in the sunset:  _ sometimes we choose not to do the easy thing.  _ “Difficult things are often worth doing.”

“Okay,” says Nile. “Let’s say I agree with you. You’re still going to stay here until tomorrow morning at least, because you had more blood on you than inside of you when you walked in here, and we aren’t going to kick you out without at least a night’s sleep. You got that?”

Booker pauses, but she looks so fierce that he can’t quite hold himself back. He’s never been good about refusing temptation, and a good night’s sleep in a safe place is definitely more enticing than driving for five hours to Strasbourg alone.

“Okay,” he says, and accepts Nile’s careful hug; nods at Nicky and Joe until they back off. Doesn’t complain when they all pile into the room to sleep, even though he doesn’t actually want to sleep with someone else for the night- Booker’s itching out of his skin, adrenaline and rage and hurt all combining to make for something very, very sour. 

It’s the exhaustion that gets him in the end: for all his racing thoughts, he closes his eyes briefly, and doesn’t even realize it before sleep’s drawn him under.

…

Regrettably, centuries of shit sleep cycles wakes him up before dawn. Booker opens his gritty eyes and stares up at the ceiling. Tries to meditate himself back into something that’ll let him be semi-functional for the day, but he’s wide awake already, and that irritates him enough to slowly pull away from Nile, who’s got an arm slung about his waist, and Nicky, who’s pressed close enough to Booker’s side for him to smell the mint on Nicky’s breath. Irritates him enough to grab a bottle of- something; the label’s rubbed clean and he doesn’t want to open it while inside the house lest the smell wake someone up. Walks up the stairs to the roof, where he settles on the edge and opens the bottle to reveal absinthe.

“Booker,” says a voice that he hasn’t heard in six long, long months. 

He takes a beat to let the heaviness of that relief weight his shoulders. Then tips his head back, just enough to see the bare edges of her dark shadow. “Hey, boss,” he says. Waits for her to come sit next to him; is surprised when she just sits at his back, spine-to-spine. Then he remembers her mortality, and it hits him like a jackhammer to the belly. “Hope you’ve got your own drink,” he says, and knows his voice shakes; loathes himself for it. “I’m not sharing.”

“Nile said you shot the lock.”

“So we’ve got another tattletale in this team,” says Booker, leaning back just a little against Andy. “Can’t say I’m looking forward to that.”

“Mmm. Pass the fucking absinthe.”

Booker laughs and hands it over. “You’ve got a nose like a bloodhound.”

“Perks of living for six thousand years.”

“Does it feel more real?” Booker traces the imperfections in the concrete shelf beneath him with the tips of his fingers. “Being mortal?”

“The fear’s real,” says Andy softly. “And it makes everything else- brighter. Sharper.” She pauses; takes a swallow. Hands the absinthe back. “It’s fucking terrible, Book. There are entire- days- when all I want is to run off a cliff. Feel the wind. Not look back.”

Joe tends to be passive-aggressive, and Nicky just avoids confrontations altogether. But Booker’s the same as Andy: they both dive into conflict like a bull into a cloth of red. They’re rather good, the two of them, at spearing through all the bullshit to the heart of the matter.

“Was that how you felt with Quynh?” asks Booker, more because he knows that nobody else will ask Andy than because  _ he  _ wants to know. “Like you’d jumped off a cliff?”

For a long moment, Andy doesn’t answer. Then: “How’d you know?”

“If Clotilde came back, I’d do anything.” Booker looks up at the stars; they’re much dimmer here, in the city, but still glittering. The Greeks had hung their heroes in the stars, and Booker’s always loved that thought: the bones in the bitter earth, the soul in the shining sky. “I suppose the question should be why you left her.”

“Because love doesn’t make us blind,” says Andy quietly. “Not forever. It hurts; it always hurts. But after a while your eyes adjust to the brightness and you see the dark shadows again.”

“And,” says Booker wryly, “Quynh wasn’t exactly trying to hide the crazy.”

“No,” says Andy, and laughs. “No, she wasn’t.” He passes her the absinthe, and she takes it with a grateful knock of her knuckles against his shoulder. “Why’d you give yourself up, Book?”

Booker leans back, so Andy’s bowing forwards into her knees. Then sits up straighter. “I’ve been in Quynh’s place,” he says finally. “Nobody can help you walk out of that darkness. But… sometimes we can stop them from hurting others.”

“Nicky told me that you think you- your only mistake was to get us captured beside you.”

_ “Fucking  _ tattletales,” says Booker.

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m an old man,” he replies tiredly. “I think I’m allowed some mistakes.”

“Don’t talk to me about being old,” laughs Andy, and Booker reaches backwards, laces his fingers through hers. “Okay. Okay. Tell me this: why’d you give us up? Not yourself: the three of us. Why?”

“I asked you,” says Booker, and takes a deep, deep swallow of the absinthe. Shudders through the aftertaste. “After Cape Town. D’you remember?”

Andy doesn’t respond for so long that Booker almost speaks again. Then she snatches the bottle from him and tosses it over the edge.

“Hey,” says Booker mildly, peering at the shattered remnants of the bottle.

“That was you  _ asking?”  _ she demands loudly. 

Booker laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “You didn’t realize, did you?”

“You’re a fucking bastard.” Andy reaches up and then, in some complicated move with her shoulders, flips Booker over her head so he crashes flat onto the roof. He lets it happen, only rolls a little to soften the landing and not tear up this pair of clothes as well. When he opens his eyes, Andy’s standing above him, hands fisted in her jacket. “Book,” she whispers. “We can’t live our lives wanting it to be over.”

The sky’s lightening; turning an interminable shade of grey. Booker can’t look away from it. He wants to look at Andy: this will likely be the last time he sees her again, but all he can see is the sky and the stars, slowly fading from his view. 

“I am so sorry,” he whispers, “for taking that choice from you.”

“I love you. We love you. Booker-”

“I wish that was enough.”

“Tell me what you need,” says Andy, and this-  _ this-  _ is the proof of it, of her goodness, which Booker doesn’t have the barest scraps of. “We’ll give it to you.”

“I was never jealous of Joe and Nicky,” says Booker softly. “I know you thought I was. I know they think I was.” He swallows. “I’m so scared for them. I’ve seen them- they’re like me, Andy. Not like you. Not like Nile. They’re like  _ me.” _

If love is a fever to Booker, it’s a wildfire for them: ravaging and lovely, blazing and brilliant. 

And there will come a day when one of them dies and does not waken, and Booker does not want to be there to see what happens to the firestorm: does it go out? Does it go out of control? Because those are the only two options. There will be no balance after that.

“You meant it as a gift,” whispers Andy, realization cold in her voice like the dew on a morning before the sun burns it away.

His lips twist into something that could be a smile. “It got out of control quickly,” Booker acknowledges. “But the knowing: that’s something I still want. Something I thought you might understand. That they might understand as well.”

“Not with  _ torture,” _ says Andy. “Not like that.”

“Well. No. That was more… stacking the odds, I suppose.” He shrugs, rolling himself up to a sitting position, but still doesn’t look at Andy. “You die enough times and one of them’s got to take.”

“You know that isn’t how it works.”

“Yeah,” says Booker. Stands, and turns to Andy, and smiles at her crookedly. “Tell me again how an atheist has this much faith in the universe, would you?”

She steps up to him and clutches him close, hands wrapping tight in the fabric over his spine. “You’re staying,” Andy says into his ear.

Booker pulls back. “I’d love to,” he says slowly. “But you need permission from the other three first, yeah?”

“You think Nicky’s going to stop you from staying? Or Nile?”

“Joe isn’t my biggest fan right now. And… he deserves the space.”

“You saved his life.”

“And he saved mine.” Booker shrugs again. “It isn’t about owing between us, Andy.”

“It’s about forgiveness,” says Andy. The rising sun lights the planes of her face, so beautiful, so dear to Booker, and he feels a lump growing in his throat, though he can’t find it in himself to turn away. “I think he’s done that already.”

When he only looks at her, she sighs. “Alright. Alright. Stay here, okay? I’ll- you- you just stay here.”

“With pleasure,” mutters Booker, stumbling backwards and letting himself settle with his back against a chimney. It’s not very warm; he thinks it might just be his imagination telling him that it’s warmer than the rest of the roof. Andy disappears down the door, and he draws his knees up; sits with his cheek pillowed on them like he’s a kid once more. 

…

It’s not Andy that returns. It’s Joe.

“Oh, she’s _ very _ lazy,” mutters Booker, before lifting his head to nod at Joe. “You guys need me downstairs?”

“Nile’s making breakfast.”

“‘m not hungry.”

“That’s what happens if you start drinking early enough,” says Joe piously.

Booker would believe him better if he hadn’t known the idiot to have worked his way through entire barrels of wine in 1852 while on a mission with Booker and separate from Nicky. It’d only been three years since Booker joined, and it’d been  _ hell  _ trying to ensure Joe didn’t die of alcohol poisoning. It had also been what taught Booker that addictions don’t last beyond death in their bodies, so he’s not entirely ungrateful for that mission, but he still thinks there could’ve been less… projectile vomiting. At least.

“Yes, yes,” he says instead. “We can discuss my terrible eating habits later.”

“Mmm. You know,” says Joe casually, “there aren’t many of us that keep learning every year of immortality.”

“Started from the bottom,” says Booker wryly. “Had to go up, didn’t I?”

_ “Kitab,”  _ says Joe, and grabs him in an affectionately bruising grip. “You idiot. Listen to what I’m saying. You spend so much time lost in your own head that you forget how much you’ve done.”

“There’s some fucked up shit there, in the story of my life. Fucked up shit that I’ve done.”

“Yes. But you look at yourself and keep thinking of ways to improve: of how life could be better. If only, if only. You only remember the bad. What you haven’t done.”

“So you’re telling me to focus on the good?”

“You  _ idiot,”  _ says Joe. His hand’s tight on Booker’s neck, the other one fisted in the sleeve of his jacket so tight that Booker’s certain the seams’ll never be the same again. “I’m telling you to see how far you’ve come.”

Booker remembers Bangladesh, and how furious he’d been even as he tried to save them. He remembers walking through his home in Belize, peeling away the layers of his heart to Nicky. He remembers waking up in a black site in Brussels, Joe’s hands tight on his face and eyes so afraid for him.

“This isn’t forgiveness,” he says hoarsely. Desperately. This can’t be forgiveness,  _ can’t  _ be, because- because- “It can’t be this easy. Joe- Yusuf-”

Joe laughs, and clasps their foreheads together. “What else is it?”

“You can’t-”

“I forgive you for being afraid,” he says gently. So gently. Infinitely gently. “I forgive you for being foolish. I forgave you for those things the day after we escaped, Book.”

Booker’s trembling, and he can’t  _ goddamn fucking stop it.  _

He pulls away, stumbles back. Hits his back against the chimney. Stops.

“Then- then-”

“I couldn’t forgive you for your anger,” says Joe. “I couldn’t forgive you for your jealousy.”

“It wasn’t  _ that,”  _ Booker manages to force out, through a throat that’s gone taut as a sailing line pulling against the wind. “Joe. It was never that. You- I thought- why would-” he breathes, tries to breathe, tries to force down the liquid terrified emotion that’s rising up from somewhere around his toes, “-I  _ love  _ you, I don’t- I’d never want you to  _ not  _ have it!”

“What did you think would happen with Merrick?” asks Joe, but he’s listening this time, where before he’s only ever shouted.

Booker spreads his arms. Remembers the bullets digging into his kidneys in the blacksite. Remembers falling from a thousand-foot tree in California, arms spread-eagled, wind so thick in his fingertips that he could almost believe himself capable of flight. Remembers following Joe off the tip of that building in London, trusting him implicitly.

“You would escape in a year,” he says. “Maybe two. Leave me behind. They’d have enough information on you; you’d make it out. In a thousand years, nobody’s ever been able to pin you three down- why would these guys be different? And maybe that would be enough. Maybe we could understand why it happens. Or- at least- how to end it.”

Joe studies him closely. “After Cape Town,” he says carefully, “you were messed up. You and Andy both.”

“Andy got me into this by feeding me the line about saving the world.” Booker laughs jaggedly. “I didn’t know that it’s impossible to replace your family with the world. Or maybe she can. I don’t know. I can’t, Joe. I’m not so good. I don’t- care. Not enough.” 

He pauses. Breathes in. Tries to catch his breath.

Covers his eyes, and curls into the chimney. “God _ damn,”  _ snarls Booker, but it’s too wet to be very convincing.

“Maybe you can’t save yourself by saving the world,” says Joe, and he reaches out, wraps a careful hand over Booker’s shoulder, then drapes it closer. He can probably feel the sobs shuddering through Booker’s chest, but he doesn’t mention it. Just comes closer, closer,  _ closer,  _ until all Booker knows is Joe’s warmth, his strength. “Maybe you need something else. But we’ll find it, okay? The five of us. Together.”

“It’s not going to be easy,” whispers Booker.

And Joe, who’d been the first person to speak to Booker after he gained his immortality, who’d washed the blood off of Booker’s skin in the Congo, who’d taught him how to fight: Joe  _ laughs. _

“When has any of this been easy?” he asks, and draws Booker away from the chimney, guides him into a proper embrace, coaxes him close. “Oh, Book, when has that ever stopped us?”

…

…

“Magda,” says a voice that she hadn’t ever expected to hear again. 

She turns to her right, and sees Augusto. 

It’s just past dawn, and she’s at the archaeological dig where she’d hidden the drive: Magda’s been coming here for the past months, whenever she gets a minute. It’s a bitter lesson to learn, not to trust anyone, but a necessary one.

Still. 

She’s heard the stories of Brussels. Augusto was captured. He didn’t survive. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that nobody survives captures like that.

And he’s still standing here, at her back, looking more alive than in all the years that Magda’s known him. 

“How are you here?”

“I got lucky,” he says quietly. “And- my brother saved me. When I didn’t think I could be.”

“The one that came in that day?”

“Another one, actually.” He nods to the site. “Have they found anything more?”

“Some jade statues.” Magda swallows. Gathers her courage. “I was wondering, you know, why you came to me. Why you asked. It didn’t make sense. You could have just tried to find it on your own- I hadn’t hidden it  _ that  _ well.”

Augusto’s jaw works for a long moment. “There’s a saying in France:  _ show me a liar, and I’ll show you a thief.”  _ He smiles, faintly, at her. “I’ve spent my life being a very, very good liar, but- not thieving. Not from those that don’t deserve it, at least.”

“Right,” says Magda. It doesn’t sound like much of an explanation to her, but then she hadn’t expected him to actually answer the question in the first place. “So. What’re you doing here?”

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“Oh?”

He shuffles a little closer. “The drive is gone.”

“You  _ gave it up,”  _ says Magda. Augusto blinks at her, and she sighs. “I may be out of the game, but I hear things still. You gave it up to some private contenders.”

“Oh,” says Augusto, and laughs.  _ Laughs.  _ “No. I gave up the drive, yes, but only after I re-programmed it. Did you hear about Leopold II’s tomb’s desecration?”

“I,” says Magda, thrown. “No?”

“Well, they got it out from there- after I’d buried it in the man’s tomb. Plugged it into their system. The second it uplinked with the satellite, it was goodbye.” He wiggles his fingers in his jacket pocket, and Magda frowns, staring. Augusto elaborates: “The second the software knew where it was being plugged in, it started a deceleration protocol in the satellite up there.”

“Deceleration protocol means… it would fall back into the atmosphere.”

“Burning like a flaming ember the whole time.” Augusto grins at her, and it’s so vicious that Magda would shrink away if she didn’t have a fence at her back. “Landed right on top of their little hideout too.”

Magda freezes. “But- weren’t  _ you  _ there?”

“Enh. Call it divine providence.”

Which isn’t an  _ answer.  _

“You made it so that whoever did get the drive would never be able to use it.”

“The software couldn’t be deleted,” says Augusto. “Knowledge can never be unknown again. But we can make it obsolete.”

“Anyone else would call it impossible, you know,” she says, and he grins at her.

“Impossible just means difficult,” he says. “And difficult just means not easy.”

Magda laughs. “I may not know English very well,” she tells him, “but I know enough to know you’re wrong.”

“Learn more,” Augusto advises her. “You’ll learn that I’m about as right as they get.”

He walks away from her, shoulders sloping low, towards a car barely visible in the distance. Then the clouds shift, sillhouetting it from behind, and Magda sees four people in it: two men and two women, waiting patiently for Augusto to make his slow, winding path back to them. She blinks, and the light’s gone, and so is the car. All that’s left is Augusto’s golden head, like a shaft of sunlight slowly passing through the dark greenery of the forest around them. Then that’s gone, too, and Magda is left alone in the slowly brightening day: one of thousands left to her to live her new life.


	2. Notes

  * Jean Bourdichon was a rather famous French painter in the 1400s-1500s. Would an unknown painting fetch 500k Euros? I do not know, I do not think so, but it’s possible. Everything’s possible in fic.
  * Strasbourg, is of course, the place where Le Marseillaise began. As Booker was born in 1770 and was likely a student/product of the French Revolution, I’d love for him to be born in Strasbourg and only later emigrated to Marseille.
  * Clotilde means “Renowned battle.” Have I spent too long in Silm fandom and want all the names to mean something on a meta-textual level? Maybe so! Maybe so!
  * Please do not set fire to your clothes on an electric stove. I do not recommend it. At all. 
    * Do I speak from experience? Yes. I do.
  * Bangladesh does not have an extradition treaty to the US, which is why Sasmita’s hanging about there instead of India. No, I could not be arsed to explain this further in fic.
  * Sasmita LK: this is how most South-Indian Hindu names work, i.e. a given name and then two letters following, the first representing the hometown of the individual and the second representing the father’s name. The letters usually aren’t expanded, and there usually aren’t last-names in older generations, though now it’s becoming more westernized.
  * Van Leyden and Bruegel were wood-carvers and illuminators in the Dutch Renaissance. The actual wood-mocking isn’t accurate, ofc, but the descriptions of imitating the work- no straight lines in the foreground, etc.- are accurate insofar as I, a person without any experience in art beyond the amateur, have noticed it.
  * Languages in Bangladesh are usually Bengali with Hindi as a common second-language. Just, ah, to prove that I’ve done some homework.
  * Bhagavan is the generic term of “god” in Hinduism, meaning the higher god that reigns above all others. Yama is the god of death, though you don’t actually get any personal calls to him as you might in, say, a Greek myth that calls on Hades very directly.
  * Most cities in south to south-west Asia tend to have highrises, simply because it’s the most expedient/spatially conserving way. Er. Come to think of it, most cities around the world are the same? I clearly didn’t use common sense on this one l o l
  * The gifts from Sasmita are actually things that you get when leaving anyone that you’ve spent an extended amount of time with in Indian culture. Shirt-pieces are just unstitched pieces of cotton dyed in different patterns; they can be sown to the body shape of the individual being gifted later, or regifted if necessary. 
  * Sanya Phoenix International Airport is the closest international airport to the South China Sea as evidenced by a quick google search.
  * Booker being the sneaky one in the team has zero (0) canonical evidence towards it but it’s still my headcanon!!!
  * Look, selling ancient coins to rich people as a sign of “heritage” or whatever _is_ a valid life choice and should be treated as such. 
    * Esp if those ancient coins are forged l m a o
  * Libretto was introduced as a nickname in my other fic (the Canon-Diverge AU) and it’s goddamn _hilarious._
  * Saltwater does fuck throats up in large doses. As evidenced by me, nearly drowning in the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and some fake beach off of Pondicherry
  * Belize got an extradition treaty to the US in 2000, so Booker’s had only a paltry twenty years to re-route his drug empire
  * Thirty pieces of silver is, ofc, the price that Judas gets when he betrays Jesus.
  * “Here is the image of a pathetic man” _genuinely_ echoes “Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed” because I’m not that creative, not in a million years!!!
  * I really do love the idea of the Old Guard just walking through all these countries causing minor (major) diplomatic incidents and not understanding/caring even if they did understand
  * Basti is the more German version of Sebastien, as far as I can tell. As coming from Strasbourg- which is on the border of Germany/France- I’d assume some accent changes. Also, yk, time changes accents too, so… idk. It’s a decent hc.
  * Tallow is activated by acid, and methane’s acidic. The slightest hint of a fire and… boom! Fire!
  * Augusto means venerable, which is the same meaning as Sebastien. Yes, Booker chose it for that, as well as the fact that Andy was going on about Augustus the Roman Emperor, whom she could very well have known personally _because she was alive then._
  * For anyone who was wondering, the timeline of the whole drive/satellite subplot is: 
    * 2009: US government launches a satellite that can identify people with much better accuracy than ever before
    * 2010: The Old Guard destroys the software that the US government had developed to monitor people, essentially rendering the satellite defunct but still in outer space
    * 2015: The Russian government develops their own software to hack into the US satellite and identify people, Magda steals the software and runs away because the software cannot be deleted, Booker puts her up in Belize
    * 2020: Booker steals the drive, uses it to track down Andy
    * 2020, two days after tracking Andy down: he adds a program to the drive which causes the satellite to decelerate and fall to the earth, then stashes the drive in Leopold II’s tomb in Brussels (which is in the Schonenburg!)
    * 2020, about a week later, after getting tortured by an unknown military group: tells them where the drive is
    * 2020, a day after telling the goons where the drive is: the blacksite is blown up by the falling satellite
  * The Congo faced some of the worst human rights abuses in recorded history, all at the behest of Leopold II of Belgium. The idea that the man has a tomb in the fucking Schonenburg still makes my blood boil.
  * Booker invents genetic modification, doesn’t take credit for it, and watches ppl figure it out in the late 1970s with a roll of his eyes. They’re all geniuses and _also_ dumbasses, what are you saying it’s unrealistic?
  * Booker tearing out a wolf’s throat with his teeth is _definitely_ my most feral headcanon, and also taken directly from Finrod from the Silmarillion lmaoooo
  * _FAMILY IS TRANSITIVE!_ Cannot wait for Booker to figure out that lie lolol
  * Booker finding drowning the best kind of death out of a vague sense of familiarity is terrible and sad and also heartbreaking. Of course I had to shove it into the fic.
  * The _them_ that Clotilde makes him promise to love is the Old Guard.
  * Quynh realizing more about Booker in two goddamn days of torture than Andy and Joe and Nicky in literally two centuries _is_ realistic. Honestly. I promise.
  * Forgery =/= forging, which is the _best_ pun and I cannot believe I haven’t heard it used before!!
  * Idk why the idea that Booker moved to Marseille from Strasbourg because his wife didn’t like the cold is hurting my heart, but it is.
  * No, Laos doesn’t have any worse mosquitoes than the rest of South Asia. Booker just imagines they do.
  * Oh, but Booker imagining those he loves with clean hands no matter what happens??? Always??? Is. GAHHHH
  * Joe’s the math guy, and Booker’s the science guy. They also like reading and other things, but that’s the basic essential difference between the two of them. No, I cannot and will not elaborate.
  * Booker goes feral over his family. That’s… canon?
  * Also we don’t really see Booker angry! Ever! We see all three of the others in various stages of anger, but never Booker, and it’s _fascinating._
  * The defenestration of Prague, which is what Booker’s referring to when he says “in my day” is actually _not_ his day, which I realized after I’d put in the joke: it’s the 17th century, not the 1700s. Yes, I’m an idiot. No, the fic isn’t going to be edited. 
    * Martinice was kind of an asshole.
    * Look. He was defenestrated. He deserved it at least a little.
  * “Patience is a conquering virtue,” is, in fact, a quote from the _Canterbury Tales,_ which remains one of the worst books I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Joe’s right to hit Booker for this quote. Booker has no defenses whatsoever.
  * Nicky not liking cars is explained in the other fic, lolol.
  * Somehow, French speakers can drag out syllables in a way that you don’t hear with any other language _except_ for New Jersey. I don’t get it either.
  * Satavahana coins- if authentic- would be great help in figuring out if the Satavahanas were a BCE-era dynasty or an ACE-era dynasty. Seeing as there’s still no consensus on that, I’m going to say that Andy’s probably the only person who knows either way, and she’s not in the mood to discuss.
  * Kitab apparently means book in Arabic, but I did use Google Translate for this one so. Anyone with more experience wants to edit it: I’ll take it!
  * Apparently the whole “show me a liar, I’ll show you a thief” _is_ a French proverb!




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